My Hugo Nominees: Best Novel and Best Series

These are the 2019 novels going on my Hugo nominating ballot, as well as my one nomination for Best Series.  Header links go to the books\’ Goodreads pages, to save me the trouble of writing synopses.

Middlegame, Seanan McGuire

I\’ve previously reviewed this one in more detail, but I want to reiterate that this book utterly blew me away.  Middlegame is the best novel yet from one of my favorite authors.  Seanan McGuire deserves a whole pile of awards for this one, with a shiny rocket perched at the top of the stack.

The Priory of the Orange Tree, Samantha Shannon

This is one of those cases where judging a book by its cover worked out really well for me.  The striking cover art for The Priory of the Orange Tree (illustrated by Ivan Belikov) immediately grabbed my attention, and the novel definitely delivered.  TPotOT fits the epic scope of a multi-book fantasy series into a single (rather large) volume, weaving together multiple satisfying character arcs with a world-saving quest.  History and tradition are a strong theme throughout the book, as the characters are forced to confront the fact that the founding legends of their culture are not as reflective of reality as they\’d always thought.

My one complaint about this book is that it feels a little rushed in places; the events of the book could have easily filled out a trilogy.  Instead, a few of the plot points were resolved somewhat abruptly in order to wrap up the story in 800 pages.  All the same, there\’s something to be said for a standalone novel in a genre that seems to regard three books as the minimum possible length for a complete story arc.

A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine

A murder mystery rife with political and personal intrigue, woven together with some classic but skillfully used SF tropes.  The new ambassador to the empire of Teixcalaan arrives from her small, independent mining colony with a malfunctioning memory implant and a pile of questions about her dead predecessor, and soon gets embroiled in Teixcalaan\’s own internal politics herself.  Martine has a lot to say about the cultural and political mechanisms of hegemony and imperialism, within an empire that at once feels attractively exotic and frighteningly familiar to a modern reader.

The Sol Majestic, Ferrett Steinmetz

Two parts coming-of-age story, one part love letter to foodie culture, one part rumination on philosophy and social justice, and a generous topping of space-station shenanigans.  The Sol Majestic was just a joy to read, with a wide cast of wacky yet deeply sympathetic characters trying to simultaneously save the titular restaurant and get the main character through his increasingly imperiled philosophical rite of passage.

Gods of Jade and Shadow, Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Something about the narrative voice took me a couple chapters to get used to, or maybe it was just the automatic distancing I tend to do when reading about abusive families – but then Casiopea accidentally let the Lord of Xibalba out of her grandfather\’s trap, and I could barely put it down after that.  The author blends Mayan mythology with the turbulence of 1920s Mexico to create a perfect, vivid setting for a tale in which the ancient and the modern clash in multiple different ways.

Best Series: InCryptid by Seanan McGuire

Unusually, I didn\’t read a lot of books in series that are eligible for the Best Series Hugo last year; in most cases, the books that I read were either standalones, in series that hadn\’t met the minimum length, or were ineligible due to having been nominated too recently.  The one exception is InCryptid, one of my favorite series, which has once again become eligible with the publication of Tricks for Free in 2018 and That Ain\’t Witchcraft in 2019.

The series is about the Price family, a group of cryptozoologists serving the cryptid population of North America and defending them from the murderous Covenant of St. George, an anti-cryptid organization the Prices\’ ancestors once belonged to.  The series started off with an urban-fantasy tone, but has grown into something entirely its own, blending folklore monsters with magic, ghost stories, and an abiding love of carnivals.  Much like the October Daye books – McGuire\’s longest-running series, and eligible for the award again next year – the individual novels in the series are a lot of fun to read, but the broader arc of the entire series is really where the work shines.  The saga of the Price family now stretches over at least nine novels (depending on whether you count the Rose books) and a big pile of short fiction; the novels frequently make reference to the family\’s history, which the short stories explore in more detail.  (It\’s fun getting to see some of the things that were referenced in the novels happen \”on screen\”, but none of the stories are required reading for the main series to make sense.)  With each new novel, we get more depth in both the past and present of the series\’ world, and McGuire draws on her love of folklore and her experience in wildlife rescue to create an entire fictional ecology of cryptids for her characters to study, protect, and befriend.

Anyway, I love recommending Seanan McGuire to new people, not only because I adore her work, but also because I can shove a gigantic pile of books she\’s already written at them, and assure them that there will be plenty more where those came from. McGuire publishes a new entry in each of the InCryptid, October Daye, and Wayward Children series every year, and usually at least one other novel besides.  She has also spoken previously about the precautions she takes to make sure her series won\’t get cancelled without an ending; she maintains an exit plan to wrap up each series within the remaining books currently contracted in case the contract for the series is not extended.  Luckily, I don\’t think that\’s going to be an issue any time soon.