Tag Archives: writer: aliette de bodard

Hugo Novellas 2025

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2025 Hugos: Goodreads / Librarything stats | Novel | Novella | Novelette | Short Story | Graphic Story or Comic | Related Work | Dramatic Presentation, Long and Short | Fancast | Poem | Lodestar | Astounding

Now that I have been unexpectedly liberated to discuss my Hugo votes, here they are in the first category that I completed. These are all good, by the way, and I found it quite difficult to rank them. (This is not the case for every category.)

6) The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar. Second paragraph of third chapter:

“Okay,” said Dr. Marjorie. “That’s it. You’re on your own.”

Generation starship where slaves v masters plays into a brutal take on academia. Get it here.

5) The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler. Second paragraph of third chapter:

“People report different things. Some say they feel nothing at all. Others say the scan brings up memories. That it somehow brushes up against them and brings them back to consciousness. They see their lives. Memory by memory, before them.”

Mammoth researchers upload the mind of a long-dead mammoth expert into the brain of a resurrected mammoth. Get it here.

4) What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher. Second paragraph of third chapter:

It occurs to me that you may think that I am making a great deal of nothing about traveling, granted that I had spent much of my youth gallivanting across Europe, sometimes while being shot at. Possibly you’re right. All I can say in my defense is that while I was in the army, no matter where we went, we had a routine. We got up, we ate bad food, we complained, we tended the horses, we were extremely bored, we ate again, we went to sleep. Occasionally we would go somewhere else and be bored there. Once in a very great while, we would spend an absolutely nerve-wracking few hours, and afterward we would be shaky and bored, but in general, the routine reigned supreme.

Haunted holiday cottage in fictional but richly realised European country. Get it here.

3) The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo. Second paragraph of third chapter:

“Oh, get up, get up, please,” Nhung begged.

Something sinister is up with the arranged wedding that Cleric Chih gets involved with. Get it here.

2) The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed. Second paragraph of third chapter:

“No,” Veris said, glancing back at the handful of guards waiting silently in the front garden. A few had also crept to the back, she knew, to guard the door in case she still, unthinkably, tried to escape.

Only the heroine can rescue two children who have been kidnapped by a monster. Get it here.

1) Navigational Entanglements by Aliette de Bodard. Second paragraph of third chapter:

As to the others… Bảo Duy was endearing but reckless, and Lành was extremely difficult to deal with or protect, which added to the annoyance.

A lovely dark story about four young women thrown together to ward off the unspeakable. In space. Get it here.

I intend to do these collages of covers for each of the relevant Hugo categories. I do them by hand using PowerPoint and Paint, without use of AI.






Navigational Entanglements, by Aliette de Bodard

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

As to the others… Bảo Duy was endearing but reckless, and Lành was extremely difficult to deal with or protect, which added to the annoyance.

A lovely dark story about four women from different Vietnamese spacefaring clans, who get thrown together to ward off an unspeakable horror which threatens them all, with undercurrents of deadly inter-clan politics and internal romance. The protagonist is subtly coded as autistic as well. The novella is often the ideal length for a story like this, allowing the writer to put in enough world-building and characterisation and yet not get lost in too long a plot. You can get it here.

The Red Scholar’s Wake, by Aliette de Bodard

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Everything was dancing and wavering, her thoughs saturated with too much information, too many people, too many grievances and old records. What steadied her was the job: the analysis of the data so she could find the proof Rice Fish needed. It might not be something she’d ever thought she’d do for pirates, but it was a familiar job: a steadying task she could keep focused on.

A space opera romance, where the extra wrinkle is that the central relationship is between a human woman and the AI of a pirate spaceship. The setup is clear and the emotional perspective of the characters totally convincing. Also the economic and political basis for pirate spaceships controlled by artificial intelligence is pulled off with assurance. Not a book you could imagine Arthur C. Clarke writing, but one you could well imagine him enjoying. Recommended, like all the Clarke finalists. You can get it here.

BSFA Short Fiction

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This rounds off my BSFA posts this year – see previously how to get the finalists, Best Art and Best Non-Fiction. I’m a Clarke judge this year so won’t comment on the Best Novel finalists, and won’t have time to read the Best YA finalists.

I found it fairly easy to rank these, though I think the vote between my top two will be close.

5) ‘Seller’s Remorse’, by Rick Danforth, Hexagon Magazine, Issue 11

Second paragraph of third section:

At the gloomy door, Sheytl performed his routine of slicking back the hair and a triple knock.

A bit of a Shaggy God story. Our protagonist tries to raise supporters for a dying deity and shenanigans ensue. A bit uneven in writing style.

4) ‘A Moment of Zugzwang’, by Neil Williamson, ParSec #4

Third paragraph (there are no sections):

Wehlstrasse was a quiet street. Seldom frequented stores and cafés lined one side. Along the other, trees evenly ranked like soldiers guarded the low balustrade above the rolling, grey river. They’d proved poor guardsmen, at least as far as Albert Vogel was concerned. Stina had watched the bee footage a thousand times. The old man visible at the edge of the frame making his way down that side of the street, coming and going behind the trees as he approached the bridge. The distinctive bushy beard jutting before him. The slow but steady gait suddenly faltering, the hand going to the jaw is if he’d forgotten something as the induced heart failure had kicked in. The stumble, the lurch. The plummet into the waters below. No witnesses, either in person or online, so no one had come to his aid and his body hadn’t been found until a couple of days later among the Hundred Island reed beds six miles downstream. Bloated, the skin of his extremities wrinkled and nibbled at by hungry critters.

A near-future police procedural about a perfect murder committed despite panopticon surveillance. I’m always a bit wary of future police stories where the boys and girls in blue don’t behave much like real policemen in our timeline, and in addition here the technology is just sufficiently flawed to allow the twist in the plot to happen. God world0building though.

3) Luca, by Or Luca

Second paragraph of third section:

She’s sitting on the stone-cold floor of the shower, folded into herself. She watches the blood run from her wrist and into the drain.

Some good things in this novella: impressive depiction of the two major characters’ psychological and personal issues, and they are brought together neatly at the end. But I did wonder if it actually qualifies as science fiction or fantasy? The unreal elements of the story are explicitly the title character’s hallucinations, which didn’t seem to me to have much direct impact on anyone other than her. I also wasn’t hugely convinced by the setting, a country in the Middle East which doesn’t feel very Middle Eastern.

2) Ogres, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Second paragraph of third section:

Stunned silence from them. And then… a medley of reactions; quite the range, now you think back on it. Because some still have that core in them, hammered there by church and village life before they did whatever each one did to make them outlaw. Some are shocked that you could even lift a hand against the Masters, let alone shed so much of that vast reservoir of blood that it might kill one. Taboos like that, beat into you from earliest childhood, they don’t get shaken free so easily. Garett, the oldest of them, is pale and shaking his head, and Nell Wilso sucks at her toothless gums. But some of the others, their eyes are lit up. They’re the ones whose crimes were against the property, not of humans but of ogres. They lost that reverence, and maybe they’ve dreamed of doing just what you did every night since. And right then you’re in no position to appreciate it, lost in a welter of guilt and panic, but it’s the first time people look at you like that. Not fond, not exasperated. You’re not the prodigal son or the lovable rogue right then. You’re the hero who slays the monster.

Dystopian agricultural future where an elite minority of big people (the ‘ogres’ of the title) holds the majority of humanity in brutal slavery, and our protagonist discovers the awful truth and begins the overthrow of the system. Enjoyed it, but it didn’t quite convince me.

1) Of Charms, Ghosts and Grievances, by Aliette de Bodard

Second paragraph of third chapter:

When Asmodeus saw the unfamiliar dragon trailing behind Thuan, his hand moved — and came back holding a knife he didn’t bother to hide.

I found this a total delight and it’s getting a firm first preference from me. I didn’t completely get on with the earlier parts of the Dominion of the Fallen series, set in a magically devastated Paris, but this is very digestible; the protagonists are a dragon prince and a demon, and the story has them sorting out a murder mystery where the ghost is still around while also babysitting some very inquisitive children. Unlike ‘A Moment of Zugzwang’, there is no police force to get wrong here, and one has the sense of a small but fascinating incident in a much broader and richly thought out society. I hope it wins.

Best Novella Hugo, 2022

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As with Best Short Story and Best Novelette, I’m not going to record my own preferences, just the fact that I’ve read this category. I will say that I thought these were all really good, and whoever it was that said that sf is at its best at novella length had a point. (I’ll also add that during eligibility research we found that several were just the merest shade under the 40,000 word limit for novellas!)

Across the Green Grass Fields, by Seanan McGuire. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Her father, a little subdued and worn out after his day at the clinic where he worked, sat across from her. He was a big man, with square shoulders and square hands, and always carried the faintest scent of fur and sweat on his skin. He wasn’t the only large-animal veterinarian in the area, but he was known as the best, and his ability to coax even the furthest-gone foal into eating had saved a lot of horses since he’d opened his practice. Regan’s riding lessons came at a discount because the owners recognized that having the local vet’s only daughter utterly in love with their horses was the opposite of a bad thing.

Elder Race, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Nyrgoth Elder was seven feet tall, gaunt, clad in slate robes that glittered with golden sigils, intricate beyond the dreams of tailors. Lyn imagined a legion of tiny imps sewing that rich quilted fabric with precious metal, every tiny convolution fierce with occult meaning. His hands were long-fingered, long-nailed; his face was long, too: high-cheekboned, narrow-eyed, the chin and cheeks rough with dark stubble. His skin was the sallow of old paper. He had horns. In the old pictures, she’d thought they were a crown he wore, but there they were, twin twisted spires that arched from his brows, curving backwards along his high forehead and into his long, swept-back hair. She would have said he was more than half monster if she hadn’t known he was something half god. He was the last scion of the ancient creators who had, the stories said, placed people on the world and taught them how to live.

Fireheart Tiger, by Aliette de Bodard. Second paragraph of third chapter:

It burnt. The tea burnt. Soggy tea leaves caught fire right in the throne room, in full view of everyone else. Not just in her nightmares or in her bedroom.

The Past Is Red, by Catherynne M. Valente. Second and third paragraphs of third chapter:

When I remember hunting my name, I mostly remember the places I slept. It’s a real dog to find good spots. Someplace sheltered from the wind, without too much seawater seep, where no one’ll yell at you for wastreling on their patch or try to stick it in you in the middle of the night just because you’re all alone and it looks like you probably don’t have a knife.

I always have a knife.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built, by Becky Chambers. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Dex realized, slowly, still naked, still dripping, that the robot wanted them to shake its hand.

A Spindle Splintered, by Alix E. Harrow. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Primrose’s castle is about a thousand times better. The stone is smooth and cool beneath my tennis shoes and the torch brackets smell of oil and char. My dress isn’t polyester and plastic; it hangs heavy on my shoulders, literal pounds of burgundy velvet and gold thread. I try to walk like Primrose, a glide so delicate it suggests my feet touch the earth only by happenstance.

NB this last includes some gorgeous interior illustrations by Arthur Rackham.

BSFA Short Fiction

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(See also: Best Art)

There are only four finalists in the Short Fiction category for the BSFA Awards this year. From shortest to longest, they are:

“Things Can Only Get Better”, by Fiona Moore

Second paragraph of third section:

“What?” Wills set her drink down very carefully on the melamine-look surface.

A fun short story about intelligent machines (“Things”) and crime.

“O2 Arena”, by Ekpeki Oghenechovwe Donald

Second paragraph of third section:

We had a plethora of assignments and projects that kept us buried to our eyebrows, even on weekends. But assignments were rarely my concern on weekdays, much less weekends. And on this weekend, Ovoke was gone.

Grim tale of a near-future Nigeria where people have to pay for everything, even the air that they breathe.

Fireheart Tiger, by Aliette de Bodard

Second paragraph of third section:

It burnt. The tea burnt. Soggy tea leaves caught fire right in the throne room, in full view of everyone else. Not just in her nightmares or in her bedroom.

Vietnamese-flavoured court politics combined with a g/g love story. Loved it.

Light Chaser, by Peter Hamilton and Gareth Powell

Second paragraph of third section:

“Hello.” She bent down and tickled the purring creature behind its ears. “You liked the fish I made for you, did you?”

Very interesting timeline mystery where the central character keeps visiting planets after very long intervals to find a peculiar legacy.

I liked all of these, but one has to express a preference, so I think mine will be 1) Fireheart Tiger, 2) “Things Can Only Get Better”, 3) “O2 Arena”, 4) Light Chaser. I don’t see an obvious front-runner.

Covers