I’m obviously writing this up late, but I did read the Hugo nominees in 2024, so let’s talk about them, starting at the bottom of my ballot and working up to the top to my favorite (which was also the award winner).

My least favorite by a mile — and the only one that I’d put under No Award — is John Scalzi’s Starter Villain. I’m not the world’s biggest Scalzi fan, but in previous years, I’ve put his work above no award, because it was enjoyable fluff. This is not. This is like decadent David Weber. The flimsy premise of the book, which you already know from the title and a four word cover blurb, isn’t revealed until a full twenty five percent of the way into the book. It’s then another 20% of infodumping before the plot starts. Yes, literally the story proper begins 45% of the way into the book; it’s just completely a thing where he should have been like “fuck, this is chapter one,” deleted everything before that, and then folded some of the information into flashbacks or brief summaries. I assume he’s too big now for an editor to push him to do that, because it’s hard for me to imagine they didn’t notice. Even after the plot does get going, the book is bloated and annoying, with lots and lots of infodumping conversations, and — worse — characters refusing to give him information that they should, because it’s important that he be the audience insert character who can react like the audience would, and therefore has to go into every scene without knowing more than the audience does. Total garbage, not even airplane book quality.

Vajra Chandasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors, by contrast, is trying so hard to be serious and deep and literary, and almost succeeding. It’s grim and depressing, full of dysfunctional families and magical realist takes on religion and colonialism and whatever else, but it all felt a little rote and over-familiar. I can see why it won so many awards — it feels like an award-winner should feel, which most of these don’t. But I think that feel is an illusion; it doesn’t really have the goods. The book is basically fine, but it’s not nearly good enough to earn its grimness or self-seriousness.

Shannon Chakraborty’s The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi is back to the fun side. And unlike the Scalzi, it hits the mark. It’s a story about the captain of a pirate ship, and the magical adventures she gets pulled into. I think it’s stronger than Chakraborty’s Daevabad novels (which I liked pretty well), and it’s the first book on this list that I’d actually recommend. But as fun as it is, light adventure fantasy isn’t really what I think about in the context of awards.

Martha Wells’ Witch King is another enjoyable fantasy, but this one I think is a little weightier. The book has world-building that feels fresh (a Wells trademark), interesting protagonists (likewise), and an interesting parallel structure, where we have a present-day story and a past story that relate to and illuminate each other. Seeing how different the young and old versions of the protagonists are is fascinating, and Wells makes them seem like entirely reasonable evolutions of their past selves. Another easy recommend, but also I’d think not quite doing award-type stuff. (But if it had won, I wouldn’t have been upset.)

Ann Leckie’s Translation State is a legitimately good SF novel, with interestingly alien aliens (who will be familiar to readers of her Imperial Radch books) whose nature it explores. It’s a little more nicey-nicey than I prefer these days — I used to really love that mode when it was rare and novel, but it’s been overdone, alas — but still very good. Is it award-caliber? Definitely not in the no-brainer way that her Ancillary novels were, but on the whole, I think yeah.

Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory is a YA-style story; in outline, it doesn’t sound promising — it’s about a teenage girl who comes of age in a dystopia and discovers that the world isn’t what she thought it was, and that neither is she. Ugh, sounds terrible, right? But it isn’t. The story is propulsive, but it’s also interesting and (without getting into spoilers) legitimately about something in the way that good SF novels are. This isn’t a stunning, must-win kind of book like some past winners have been (Broken Earth, looking at you), but it’s good in the ways that you’d want an award winner to be.