Award season is almost here, and as you can no doubt guess, we have… opinions. Specifically, opinions about the six novels on the short list for 2025’s Hugo award. Are these books good? Yes, and also no. They’re a continuum, you might say. And somehow, Adrian Tchaikovsky is on both ends of that continuum. How did he get there? If you listen in, you might just find out.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Melanie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Intro Music]Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren, with me today is:
Bunny: Bunny!
Oren: and
Chris: Chris
Oren: So today we are discussing the six best books of 2024.
[Chuckling]Oren: This is a very objective measurement of the best books. It’s definitely not just the six that were chosen by a kind of limited audience popularity contest.
Bunny: Look, one of them was pretty good.
Oren: Yes. So, this is our Hugo episode because there are six Hugos. And let’s just go around and say how many of them we read. Bunny, how many of them did you read?
Bunny: Two.
Oren: Okay. Very respectable. Chris, how many did you read?
Chris: Well, I might say three. But the reality is that I read … [laughing] … the truth is that I did not finish most of them. I finished two and then I started three more, and one of them I was just, no. Not at all.
Bunny: And one of them that you did not finish was on the list for some reason.
Oren: Just remember, because I would never brag, I’m a very humble person, but I did read all six and I’m therefore a superior being.
Bunny: Ah, so this was a shaming question. I see. I am firmly in third place here. In my defense, I read a lot of other things on the proto-Hugo List you made, your prediction chart. I was constrained by what was at the library because I’m glad I didn’t buy some of them.
Chris: Well, you did finish Ministry of Time, right? I feel like that deserves a round of applause.
Bunny: Woo. Okay. Maybe I can get bonus points for Ministry of Time. I read Ministry of Time and The Tainted Cup and a bunch of others that didn’t end up on this list. Which is funny to me because there were many on there that deserved to be on the list more than Ministry of Time.
Chris: Yeah. This year we tried to guess–I should say mostly Oren tried to guess, and some of us added a few additional books–what books might end up being nominated, which is an interesting exercise. The book that I was most surprised to not get nominated was Leigh Bardugo’s The Familiar. It has a lot of things that I feel like Hugo voters like where it’s got a historical setting that focuses on marginalization and also has the kind of wordcraft that I would expect that Hugo voters would be interested in. I do wonder if the fact that it was so focused on the romance hurt it. Now there are a couple other Hugo nominees that do have romances but I feel like they’re less conventional romances than what’s in The Familiar.
Oren: Yeah. So, okay, let’s run through this real quick what those six books are. I mean they’re on the show notes, but just in case. So, the six are Alien Clay, Ministry of Time, A Sorceress Comes to Call, Someone You Can Build a Nest In, Service Model, and The Tainted Cup. So those are the six that actually got nominated for the Hugo. Then there are several others that we think maybe should have been on there instead.
Bunny: Yeah, certainly more than the existing one. I think that the other books from your list that I read, most of them, aside from Tainted Cup, which was the only one I could really wholeheartedly recommend, of the ones I ended up being able to read, I would’ve been a little annoyed if they had been nominated but far less annoyed than I was about Ministry of Time. Like Last Murder at the End of the World had a plot, things happened. The mystery, once it got started and you got past all of the convoluted worldbuilding, was fun. Ministry of Time was a slog.
Oren: Yeah. So, if I was going to modify this list, and again, this is already from a biased sample size, right, because I was reading books specifically because I thought they might be on the Hugo finals, but just based off of that sample size, I would axe Alien Clay and Ministry of Time, and I would replace them with The Spellshop and The Warm Hands of Ghosts. That last one, I think only I read.
Chris: Probably why it wasn’t nominated.
Oren: Yeah, like I haven’t heard anyone talk about it despite it getting a respectable number of Goodreads views. But I liked it. And granted it’s also about World War I and about an aspect of it that I find really interesting, so, there’s a little bit of a targeted audience thing going on there. And I can see replacing A Sorceress Comes to Call with The Familiar. To me, I could go either way on that one. I don’t have strong feelings.
Bunny: I don’t know if I would put The Spellshop up there, but my feelings about The Spellshop are known.
Chris: I know you have different feelings about The Spellshop than we do.
Bunny: It’s not interesting enough. One of the funny things about the Hugos and any awards competition is that comparing these books to each other is always extremely funny, and I think it would be the strangest time for me to have to compare The Spellshop to The Tainted Cup. Like they’re just such different books. But you have to do that, right? You have to do that for the Oscars and stuff too, obviously.
Chris: And I voted for both of those to be nominated. It was pretty predictable that The Tainted Cup got nominated and The Spellshop didn’t. I do think that, just like romance, that cozies have a tough time and lighter stories have a really tough time getting nominated for the Hugos. Legends and Lattes did it because that one was kind of a big hit and a trendsetter, but I think cozies in general are going to, people just feel that darker stories are deeper, and it’s unfortunate, but it’s how it goes.
Oren: Which is just funny because every so often there’s a think piece panicking about how light stories are taking over. It’s like, Calm down. Look at the ones actually winning the awards, friend.
Chris: Yep, yep. Not actually happening.
Oren: Yeah. So, to me they have like a pretty clear scale of quality books where I just find Alien Clay and Ministry of Time to just be… I don’t get it. I don’t understand what we’re doing here. With Alien Clay, yeah, it tells me that the author shares my politics mostly, which I guess is nice, but I can get that from reading his BlueSky account. There’s no story here.
Bunny: Nominating Adrian Tchaikovsky’s BlueSky account for a Hugo. That is innovative.
Oren: Yeah, there you go. I mean, I’m glad. I’m glad he’s anti-fascist. That’s good. That is a good thing, but I just don’t really think it has that much of an impact on his book.
Chris: For me, the funny thing, if we’re talking about Tchaikovsky, is usually I hear a lot of people refer to various writing as lazy, and I almost never do that. Generally, you don’t know what was going on with the writer. They were probably trying their best, got a lot on their plate already, but when I look at Tchaikovsky’s writing, you know, I don’t know if my perception is accurate, but the thing that really strikes me is it seems lazy and it’s like the only author where that is true.
Now, there are two Tchaikovsky books that were nominated, and one of them, I think, actually deserves that nomination. Just to add, make it a little more complicated. But Alien Clay…I did this love interest beauty pageant article on the site where I took out the introductory description of various love interests and kind of made it into a fun contest, and he describes the love interest when she enters the story as just dark and fleshy. And it’s just like, like how? How is she dark and how is she fleshy?
Bunny: Me receiving a valentine that says, You’re dark and fleshy. That’s what I love about you.
Chris: I guess it’s creative in a way. I mean, maybe not the dark part, I suppose calling the love interest fleshy, but it also feels so slapdash. It doesn’t feel like you put in effort.
Oren: That’s basically the issue with Alien Clay, is that Alien Clay reads like a university lecture, and I’m sure its fans will tell me that was on purpose because the main character is a university professor, but it’s so dull and dry and it doesn’t feel like a story. There’s very little story. It’s just like, Hey, we’re hanging out. It sucks and it sucks a lot, but not in a way that feels dangerous or immediate, and then we win later, and don’t ask how, it just kind of happens.
Bunny: Look, the way to defeat fascism is to give in to a not at all suspicious hivemind.
Oren: Yeah, it’s fine. Don’t worry about it. Whereas Service Model, which has a very similar writing style, Tchaikovsky doesn’t really do immersive description as far as I can tell, but in Service Model, it works a lot better because Service Model is funnier, he’s using that very dry acerbic narration to make jokes, so it actually feels like it’s adding something, and then Service Model also has a lot of novelty because we are really focusing on how weird these robots are in the way they make decisions and how that’s different from humans and that’s, to me, I think the big source of what made Service Model interesting. Whereas I didn’t feel like Alien Clay did anything with that. It was just, sure, there’s alien ruins, I guess, and that’s it.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, for books that get a Hugo, I just want to see that they have good knowledge of story structure and good storycraft. The Spellshop, for all it may have seem plain, I felt like it showed that. I felt like it showed a lot of deftness when it came to constructing a plot in a way that a lay person may not appreciate.
Bunny: Are you calling me a lay person? I’ll have you know I’m an expert.
[laughing]Oren: It is kind of funny to me that most people who do a lot of reading or watching of movies or whatever, or any kind of consuming of media for a living, they almost always prefer weird out there stuff because they want to see something different. With Chris and I, it’s the opposite. It’s like, no, we want to see the basics done well because we almost never see that.
Chris: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I just want to see somebody who has nailed those foundations. And with both Ministry of Time and Alien Clay, they’re just like not there. I have not read Alien Clay. That’s the one I just said: No. Ministry of Time was one of the ones I did not finish, and it is just, oh, so much summary, so much exposition. I mean, we talked about it a number of episodes ago. It has the things that the literary crowd likes, but it does not, in my mind, show good storycraft fundamentals.
Oren: See, I did put Ministry of Time ahead of Alien Clay mostly because—despite the fact that it’s not a good book—there is at least a spark of passion for real life guy Graham Gore, historical figure. I can feel the author is interested in him.
Bunny: Oh, the author loves Graham Gore and this doomed expedition.
Oren: Big fan.
Chris: We even have interludes where we go into his life.
Oren: So, there’s something there, right? Whereas with Alien Clay, it’s like, it doesn’t feel like this story is passionate about anything.
Bunny: If I could take the author of Ministry by the hand and be like, let me give you some advice about your ideas before you write this book I would say, historical fiction. Write it about this boat and this doomed expedition, but something goes fantastical and alternate history or something. You love this guy, let’s stick here. And not the tedious—
Chris: But she’s writing what she knows and she has a super big crush on him, so she needs to write herself having a big crush on him.
Oren: Oh gosh.
Bunny: It did sort of feel that way, especially since the character didn’t have a name. That’s very literary.
Oren: To look at the books in the middle for a second because it’s easy to get obsessed with the two that are bad and then the two that are good. So, I find anything by T. Kingfisher, and this is A Sorceress Comes to Call, very funny because we know because of A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking that Kingfisher does know how to plot. She simply chooses not to most of the time.
Chris: Yeah, we read A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking first, and I was like, oh, because I’d heard a lot about T. Kingfisher from other people who are fans, and I was like, oh wow, she is quite good. And then several books later, it’s like, okay, those books all have basically the same problem, where it turns out she really doesn’t like plotting. She just wants to build a collection of characters she likes hanging out. Just hanging out with each other. That’s what she actually wants to write and that’s what most of her books are.
And A Sorceress Comes to Call has a great opening. It has a fabulous opening. It is dark, but it’s very good. It is focused on abuse. And that abuse has a magical element in this story, and it’s brought to life so vividly and it’s really good. But the problem is as the book progresses, the characters just hang around and I mean, at this point, I have to say Kingfisher probably doesn’t really care about having the plot happen, but the characters basically spent a whole bunch of time talking about how they should have a plan and when they finally come up with a plan— and I’m bored at the lack of movement—when they finally come up with it, it is so bad. It is: Let’s do this and then maybe we’ll find out more about what the villain wants, even though it’s kind of obvious. And then when we find out what she wants, maybe then we’ll come up with a plan. So, it’s like a plan to come up with a plan.
Oren: That’s a good plan.
Bunny: Matryoshka doll plan.
Chris: And I just found that I almost stopped there. Like I took a break because I was so frustrated, and then I continued and then stopped later because I was frustrated.
Oren: It has a decent ending. It takes a while to get there, but it does have one. Kingfisher is too successful for plots now. It’s like if I ever become a successful author, all of my books will be weird airship terminology, and you’ll just be like, Oren, what is a keel corridor? You forgot to say what that is. What is goldbeater’s skin? Why are you talking about this so much? And I’ll be like, you can’t stop me! Anything I write will sell now!
Bunny: Well, the funny thing about A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking is that it’s two well-plotted books that are very different in tone stuck together.
Oren: Yeah, but there’s baking in both of them.
Bunny: That’s true. There is baking. There is continuity in the act that the protagonist performs. We have a mystery and a war story, and both are good on their own and yet they feel weird in the same book. That was my take on that book.
Chris: I have to say, the way it comes together in the end is not quite right, which is common, though. That’s a lot of times the hardest thing in plotting, bringing the end together, and so even with A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, we can see some cracks there. At the same time, it still feels like it shows a lot of skills that Kingfisher does not show in her other books.
Oren: She doesn’t have to anymore.
Chris: She does not have to. There’s also just some fundamental things about the story that don’t quite work. It’s kind of misogynist, honestly, which is surprising from Kingfisher where we have this villainess who has tons of magical powers, but all she wants to do with them is seduce a rich man.
Oren: No, hang on. It’s even weirder than that. She doesn’t even use her powers to seduce rich men. She just also has a lot of magical powers. And then seduces men. Those are just two things that are true at the same time. They’re just unrelated.
Chris: The characters have a lot of debates: Oh, should we tell the guy that she’s seducing that she’s an evil sorceress? Nah. And so they have to come up with excuses for that. It just has a lot of fundamental things that are not quite working either, but it has a fantastic opening. I see why it got people’s attention. And also, Kingfisher has gotten Hugo’s before, or at least one Hugo before, so not terribly surprising, that this was nominated.
Bunny: Look, can we make a pact that if one of us is being seduced by an evil sorceress, and the other two know about it, that they will tell the third one? I think that’s just what friends do, you know?
Chris: I think we can make that agreement.
Oren: No, we wouldn’t want to upset you. Don’t worry. Apparently, he wasn’t that seduced because (spoilers) at the end, when he finds out that she died horribly, he’s like, Eh. He has the most nonplussed reaction you’ve ever seen. And they never tell him that she was evil. They just tell him that she died horribly. And he’s like, oh, well, you know. So it goes.
Chris: So, let’s talk about Someone to Build a Nest In, because this is a pretty unique story. It’s not my favorite, but I think being nominated makes sense for this book. It stands out: it has a monster as the main character, who has a unique voice, it also features abuse, abusive family situation, it has queer romance.
I had trouble with it because after the initial novelty of the monster POV started to wear off, I didn’t have great attachment to the characters. As opposed to A Sorceress Comes to Call, where I like the characters pretty well, but the plot, it’s really sagging. Someone to Build a Nest In has a decent plot with twists and turns but the main character is a little on the selfish kind of hypocritical side and the love interest doesn’t have a lot of agency.
Oren: This is the thing I don’t get about the main character, is that it feels like the entire character portrayal of her, because she’s always talking about how humans suck. Humans are the worst. And it just kind of depends on you not remembering that she murders people when she wants a snack. And that’s not part of the story. She never does that on screen or particularly seems to want to, we’re just told that’s the thing that she’s done. And I don’t understand why. Why not just have it be that she’s only ever had to kill in self-defense since it’s not part of the story anyway? I don’t get it.
Bunny: Look, someone liked in What We Do in the Shadows.
Chris: She is put in a position where she’s on the defensive in the beginning of the book, but at the same time she’s so powerful that I can never quite feel sympathy for her. And so if she was more of an underdog and she was not killing people, if we didn’t hear about her escapades killing people, I feel like she would’ve been closer to Murderbot probably, and a character that I could get a lot more on board with. She’s still a very unique character. I’m sure some people love her, but I couldn’t quite. The novelty wore off and the attachment wasn’t there to replace it.
Oren: She definitely rubs me the wrong way because I’m just not into characters who are constantly going on about how humanity sucks. Because it’s like, I don’t know, man. You try to do better, you know, make your own species and show me how that goes. We’re doing our best here, all right. So that just always irritates me and the fact that she’s clearly the worst, except for during the story for whatever reason, it makes that hit harder.
Chris: But she has one weakness, because she’s too powerful, and then that weakness is negated.
Oren: Right, because having weaknesses is hard. Why would we want that? It would be like if in the beginning of a Superman story, he said, Oh, my only weakness is kryptonite. And then someone fired a kryptonite gun at him, and then he’s like, Ah, but you see I also wear a bulletproof vest, so NBD.
[laughing]Chris: So yeah, there are places that it’s not as tense as it should be.
Oren: Yeah, it does have a very cool twist at the end which I really liked. That makes it a lot better. It’s just like a lot of stories, we were talking about this a couple episodes ago, they have a strong start because we put a lot of effort into it and then a cool, exciting climax. And then there’s just a middle where stuff happens, we kind of mill around until it’s time for the ending.
Bunny: I will say having not read the book that I would nominate it for a Hugo just for having a good title.
Oren: Yeah, I mean it’s a memorable title. It’s a hard to say title, though. It’s like, Hey, have you read Someone You Can Build a Nest In? That’s awkward. That takes like five years to say.
Bunny: That’s better than The Mimicking of Known Successes, though.
Oren: It is better than The Mimicking of Known Successes. It at least has something to do with the story. I started shortening it to Build a Nest, but even that doesn’t really work I don’t think.
Chris: But still I could give that one full points for creativity. I can see how it got nominated.
Oren: I won’t be mad if it wins.
Chris: I won’t be mad either.
Oren: I will be mad if The Tainted Cup doesn’t win, though. I guess I will be mad if any book but The Tainted Cup wins because The Tainted Cup should win because it’s the best one. But other than that, I wouldn’t be mad.
Bunny: Despite it only having a single tainted cup. That’s not terribly important in the scheme of the book. It was very, very good.
Oren: Relation of title to book is not high.
Bunny: There is a tainted cup that comes up at the end. I was waiting for the tainted cup to appear, but it did not play a prominent enough role for me to cheer when it showed up.
Chris: Well, it has gravitas, which is probably what they were going for.
Bunny: It does. Thematic, I guess. There were a lot of tainted things and a cup was among them.
Oren: It’s better than the working title, which was Sherlock Holmes and Watson, but it’s Roman Empire, Kind of, and also There’s Lots of Cool Plant Magic.
Bunny: That would be harder to say than Someone You Can Build a Nest In.
Chris: Okay. The thing I don’t get about the setting is why you would do a somewhat Roman empire setting and then make up a bunch of titles of officers that are not real Roman titles but are still extremely confusing and hard to keep track of.
Oren: Yeah it does have too many ranks.
Chris: Why would you do that?
Bunny: It absolutely needed the list of ranks at the beginning because otherwise I would not have been able to follow it.
Chris: If they’re not real title, why not make them easier to remember and understand?
Oren: I was really confused when I was looking at the list of titles because it’s like, princeps, okay, well that’s a Roman rank. It’s not the rank they’re using here, but it’s Roman. Where are all these other ones from? Like, are these real ranks? I just don’t know about, did he just grab one from, you know, every country he threw a dart at? I don’t know. Is there a real place somewhere with the title immunis? Who knows.
Chris: It’s also not that Roman, honestly, the titles are one of the most Roman things in there, and they’re not real Roman. I feel like you could just take out the Roman element.
Oren: Yeah. I mean, it’s got legions and senates and patronage. It has some less blatant Roman inspiration.
Chris: Okay. But anyway, it’s weird. We actually really like this book. We’re just complainers. We’re just big complainers.
Oren: That’s just how we do.
Chris: So I was talking about the few things that I have to complain about with this book.
Bunny: How this is on the same list as Ministry… It’s shocking to me. I guess Din doesn’t step back and think briefly about how racism is bad and then go about his day. I guess that’s the difference.
Oren: Look, the Hugo contains multitudes, okay?
Chris: So this is a Sherlock mystery with a really cool bio-cosmic horror setting that really adds lots of novelty and is recounted in a lot of depth. I think also the wordcraft is pretty good and the description really helps bring it to life. I very much like the main character, Din, I find him very lovable and we’ve got the eccentric Sherlock that he works for in the background but she gets overstimulated easily, so she can’t go around to the crime scenes herself and so our Watson does that, and he’s basically the main character.
Oren: And he’s also dyslexic.
Bunny: Yeah, it does a great job using its magic system, for lack of a better word, to also portray characters with disabilities or disability equivalents. So, Din is dyslexic and Anna has sensory issues. She gets overstimulated really easily and stuff like that, which I thought was very cool and well done.
Oren: It’s funny to me because I’ve gotten so used to weird portrayals of dyslexia that I didn’t recognize that he was dyslexic until Chris pointed it out. And I was like, oh, yeah, okay, that makes sense. And that’s not a knock on the book. Like I don’t think that Bennett needed to make it more obvious. It’s just, it didn’t occur to me because the last time I saw a dyslexic character in a big sci-fi property he was immune to time madness because he sees everything backwards already and it’s like, okay, I guess that’s what dyslexia is in Star Trek.
[laughing]Chris: You’re making it weird, Star Trek.
Bunny: The linguistic shift, let’s say. It’s not the same. Thanks, Star Trek.
Chris: I will say the ending to the mystery is a little predictable for me anyway, but honestly, I would much prefer an ending that’s a little predictable to one that doesn’t make any sense. And my experience is it’s going be one or the other because a lot of times it’s just people are trope savvy enough and can see where things are going enough, it’s extremely difficult to have a super surprise ending that actually follows all the foreshadowing you put down. So even though there were some things about it that I predicted I was still pretty happy.
Bunny: And here’s the thing, is that something being predictable is often used as an insult to it but often what it means is that the foreshadowing was good and readers were able to tie the foreshadowing to the conclusion and that means that the conclusion followed logically from the foreshadowing. When people start calling something predictable as a universal bad then we get Game of Thrones trying to outsmart Reddit.
[laughing]Oren: I would say that it’s an ending where you can guess what’s going to happen but it doesn’t feel frustrating because it’s not something where it feels like the characters should have guessed it already. And that is often the sign of a good mystery because we want to solve the mystery. That’s part of the reason we read mysteries in the first place.
Chris: So, yeah, that one we’ve been passing around talking about it with our followers on Discord. It seems to be pretty popular. There’s no book that’s universally liked, but generally people have been very positive who’ve read it. So that’s a good read, as long as you’re okay with something that is a little dark, it’s not very dark, but people die in horrific ways, killed by plants bursting out of them and stuff like that. So if that’s okay with you then it’s a great read.
Bunny: And that’s not a spoiler because that is the first scene.
Oren: At least some of them deserved it, though.
Chris: Yes, true. Some of them did deserve it.
Bunny: Yes. It’s quite a good mystery with a distinctly okay climax and I hope that one gets it.
Oren: Yeah, it’s just a very good book, you know. It’s just good. All right, well, I think on that unusually positive note, we’ll go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Chris: You can reward us for saying good things about books by supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/Mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber, he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[Outro music]