Dutifully I have continued reading 2025 Hugo nominees, but I did not enjoy them. This won’t stop me from telling you about them! Far from it…
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
In the interest of total honesty, the “Good Morning America Book Club Pick” sticker on the front cover put me off this poor novel before I could even begin reading it. Does that make me an elitist? A villain? A criminal? A hater? Yesssssssss. And I’m entitled to be one.
Nobly I picked up the book and brought it home despite GMA’s endorsement, and my journey with it began inoffensively. The concept is hooky: an unnamed civil servant is assigned to a secret time travel bureau in the British government, where she must help acclimate a handsome 1850s polar explorer to the contemporary world, until it becomes evident that (SHOCK!) the British government has evil plans for the time-displaced. Kaliane Bradley is a sharp writer at the sentence level and composes entertaining scenes. She approaches her subject matter intelligently and provides pithy insights.
But the further I went, the more detached I became, and that is because the book as a whole is a bit of an overstuffed Frankenstein’s Monster. One-third of this book is a sort of autofiction essay about the predicament of being a colonized person serving a rapacious empire. One-third of this book is a time travel espionage comedy-thriller about Old Timey British people confronting New Timey Britain. And the last third of this book is self-insert fanfiction about fucking a character from The Terror, who also happens to have been a real dude.
On the one hand, as the author of much conceptually inflated fanfiction myself, I must wholeheartedly commend Kaliane Bradley for using her own fic to Get That Paper. The sex scenes in The Ministry of Time are some of its best sequences, sweet and sexy and sensual and made only slightly more glamorous than the actual sweaty act. But boy howdy does the romance have the signature molassesian pacing of fanfiction, dilly-dallying on the excruciating slow flirtation between the lead characters with a maximum of navel-gazing and a minimum of plot advancement. I am not a romance reader. I am not even really a fanfiction reader. I have no interest in being stewed at length in a couple’s hazy unfulfillment. As Nike likes to say, Just Do It.
The poetics of fanfiction spread in a moldering fashion over the thriller elements, constricting the actual plot so the story beats fart out in random bursts, until they suddenly pour down in a final unbalanced cascade near the book’s end. The autofictional account of being a white-passing Cambodian-British person working as a technician of empire clings awkwardly to the exterior of this tangle, occasionally injecting some allegorical significance to the circumstances of the time-displaced.
The narrator and protagonist of the book realizes herself to be a villain by seeing the effects of her work on the white, British time travellers. She reforms by leaving her job and possibly moving to Alaska to be with her boyfriend from The Terror. For a story allegedly about engaging with one’s culpability in state violence, The Ministry of Time doesn’t push its protagonist very hard or do much to dig into the British government’s plans or goals for time travel technology. I wish I weren’t this guy, but the trumpeting prioritization of romantic love over all other ends throughout popular media may in fact be a
*gulp*
bourgeois concept which intervenes to prevent the promulgation of more radical social concepts.
I wanted to be relieved when this book was finally done, but it denied me even that mercy. The novel closes with the most thuddingly obvious direct statement of what you’re supposed to take away, and it is a sentiment which I find to be a very thin prescription for the horrors of climate change and colonial violence discussed in the novel. Hope and forgiveness were the real time travel all along? I read the last line and I said aloud “eyeroll emoji”.
I hope that if you read this book, you enjoyed it and learned something. I also hope that it inspired you to pick up one of the other books mentioned within it, such as the work of Frantz Fanon. I do not expect he will be featured in the GMA Book Club any time soon.
Someone You Can Build A Nest In by John Wiswell
I also didn’t want to read this book, and that was before I even met it. I heard the word “cozy” in the premise and my skin peeled off and crawled away, not unlike the blob monster Shesheshen, protagonist of Someone You Can Build A Nest In (SYCBaNi). I’m not into “coziness” or the “cozy” movement. My distaste springs from both personal and political ends. If you know me from real life, the personal element explains itself, and if you want to hear more about the political element, I will fob you off onto other critics because I mean this to be a book review, not a manifesto.
Unfortunately for me, I take my self-appointed responsibilities very seriously, so I read SYCBaNi. Much like The Ministry of Time, the concept is solid: a shapeshifting blob creature named Shesheshen awakens from hibernation to find her lair invaded by monster hunters. She is injured in the melee, and in the course of her escape, meets a kindly young woman named Homily who heals her. Still disguised as a human, Shesheshen falls in love with Homily, but their bliss is interrupted by Homily’s family, monster hunters who want to kill Shesheshen to end a curse on the family line. Now Shesheshen finds herself undercover among those who wish her dead, and in love with one of their number!
See, I sold that pretty well. And to stretch my extremely limited capacity for critical generosity to the absolute limit, the early chapters were only semi-agonizing. I actually found Shesheshen a likable enough neurodivergent-vague protagonist, more relatable to me than Murderbot, for example. She struggles to interpret people’s facial expressions and tones, and often questions the standing order of society in a way that grinds people’s gears. Slay!
But here’s my first qualm (beyond my general cozy-oriented vitriol): Shesheshen’s social capabilities vary wildly while the text insists again and again that she only ever struggles. The only time I recall her fighting to produce speech is when she’s in incredible pain, a situation in which many people might struggle to speak, whether their neuros diverge or not. She masterfully manipulates multiple humans via well-projected social moves. She supposedly knows nothing about human society, and yet she is quick to analyze Homily, her family, and the other human characters with exceedingly execrable 2020s “I am chronically online” therapy-speak. I wanted to tell Shesheshen to touch grass, but she lives in the woods in a medieval fantasy world; she conducts her whole life knee-deep in grass. Somehow, despite this, somewhere down the line she swallowed six whole volumes of Brené Brown and Bessel van der Kolk.
Meanwhile the human characters barely stand up to this kind of pop psych analysis. Homily’s only characteristics are that she’s nice and she’s traumatized by her abusive family. I think she’s also supposed to be smart and outdoorsy, but it’s hard to say because everything about her is subordinated to the narrative labor of being Shesheshen’s girlfriend. I’ve known Sims who had more going on personality-wise than Homily. And I’ve known plenty of people in real life who were abuse victims and yet possessed whole reams of qualities, because–and this is critical–they were people.
In this world having only two traits is evidently a heritable condition, because Homily’s mother and siblings also have only two traits each: they’re evil and they have bad taste. Homily’s family, including her sibling who is a child under the age of ten, are viciously, relentlessly evil and cruel to such a degree that the text assures you they all unequivocally deserve to die. And don’t worry: if their many beatings and castigations of Homily are too subtle to telegraph that they are the villains, she and Shesheshen and the narrator will refer to them on every other page as “abusers”, in the exact fashion of the guy who’s getting banned from a Discord you like because he keeps harassing the mods about a point of order from three years ago that’s been resolved ten times over.
If having the protagonist tell you how to feel over and over is still too subtle, Homily’s family also dress too ostentatiously, the key sign that someone is evil. This is something which also aggroed me to no end in Bridgerton, another recent cultural production which feigned investment in pleasure and liberation, but actually smoked a weird kind of pastel crypto-conservatism. SYCBaNi assures you that villainy is signalled by how much makeup someone wears and whether they have an overly elaborate and colorful weave. The comments on Homily’s mother and sisters’ hair and makeup appear in every scene, without fail, to remind you that showiness equals villainy, just like all of us who aren’t hot believed in high school. The idea that people who enjoy looking unusual or over the top, who like to wear makeup or have crazy hairstyles, are morally degenerate: this idea is propaganda that turns you into a beige-as-fuck fascist. It is an idea which I have most often heard emerging from the lips of the whitest, most suburban Boomers on earth.
All this to say that Homily’s family were not compelling villains because they had nothing to them, and Homily was not a compelling love interest because there was nothing to her either. I don’t need a book to tell me that some people are All Good and some people are All Bad. I am an adult. One of the hardest parts of Detroit: Become Adult is realizing that every single person, including the ones who suck, have multiple layers and different relationships with different people. Many people who hurt their families are beloved by their coworkers, many people who hurt their neighbors are beloved by their families, and so on. Abusers are scary because they’re just like us. The world is fucked like that.
Homily is dull because she is Just Good. She is a mere receptacle for Shesheshen to fall in love with instantly, so we can flat-foot our way through trite recitations of how love is so magical it might cause you to literally grow a heart. I really have no qualms with people in a story falling quickly in love or banging it out upon meeting. Certainly, I prefer it to the mind-numbing material most often peddled under the term “slow burn”. But there wasn’t anything in SYCBaNi to help me understand why Shesheshen and Homily liked each other because Homily is a woman without qualities.
Part of this inability to connect with the book’s central relationship is on me: this is an asexual romance and so there’s no attraction to discuss. Sexual attraction is a big part of how I understand romantic love. Acting unwise to Get It is the most interesting part of a romantic relationship in my view. However, I also can’t help but feel that if this had been an genuinely substantive account of an asexual romantic relationship, then I would now feel like I Understood More About Asexual Relationships because that is one thing Books Are For: Learning How Other People See The World. I do not feel I learned more about how asexual people experience relationships or romance. I feel like I listened to a person explain about their OCs for a long time, but since they weren’t in the room with me at the time, I didn’t even have to pretend to listen.
I might have been more engaged had I enjoyed Wiswell’s writing style, but I didn’t. It’s the vibes-based style that plagues fanfiction and the writing of self-styled “gifted kids” where they learned many, many words through context clues and then never thought to look them up in the dictionary to doublecheck what they mean in a specific sense. I’m sympathetic: I’ve learned lots of words through context clues and sometimes I get them wrong or mix them up with similar-sounding words. You know what else I do? Check the dictionary! The OED is only a click away. I start to lose sympathy when I recall that this is a “professionally edited” book riddled with malapropism and weak plotting and world-building. DAW’s personal stock with me plunged by the page.
Here is my biggest quibble with this book’s Hugo nomination: there’s no reason for this book to be a second world fantasy. Wiswell’s world has nothing particular to it besides Shesheshen’s species. I’ve read D&D setting sourcebooks more thrilling and alive than the world of SYCBaNi. The country names in this book could stand alongside the very worst of those gaming sourcebooks: L’Etat Bon, the Al-Jawi Empire. Gosh, you don’t think the people from L’Etat Bon are gonna be kinda French, do you? And the people from the Al-Jawi Empire kinda Arab? Oh wow no way. Is there any more to that? Anything about those cultures that distinguishes them or links them to their environments or suggests they have histories and contexts? No? Oh well.
No one speaks in SYCBaNi as if they live in another world, and no one sees that world in a new way. Even Shesheshen sees the world in the way of a kinda autistic girl from 2020s America, not a liquid predator. This story would function in exactly the same way if it were framed as a modern urban fantasy. The characters would have guns instead of crossbows, but since they already use the crossbows in exactly the same way as guns, it wouldn’t matter. Honestly, the story could have had no fantastical parts and still functioned largely the same, except Shesheshen would be a serial killer instead of a cute monster girl and then only the Hannibal fans would have loved her. I don’t feel a book which engages so perfunctorily with its own genre should be considered for arguably the most famous award in genre writing.
This book was billed as cozy horror-romance. The romance was contrived. The horror was unconvincing, lots of bland descriptions of guts and goo without real discomfort or fear, since Shesheshen only ever ate people who Deserved It, their suffering smooooothly elided. And as for cozy? Cozy’s not for me.
We’re four Hugo nominees into the six total and what have we discovered? We have identified several themes: writing that pulls its punches and weasels out of consequences and ambiguity; meandering and repetitive plotting which spirals around the same couple of beats; stories which make little use of their genre elements, SFF garnish instead of foundation.
I recently saw a BookTube person commenting on the collapse of developmental editing in genre writing, and two-thirds of the way through this experiment I feel that concern poignantly. All four of the 2025 Hugo nominees I’ve read, even the ones I enjoyed, needed more outside intervention to become truly great. None of them, including the ones I enjoyed, would I consider worth buying, especially not in hardcover for $35-$60–there’s so much better writing out there for free.
If you say something about fanfiction being free right now, I will come to your house and make you eat live worms.
If Alien Clay and The Tainted Cup don’t prove to be incomparable bangers, rest assured that next year I will be reading the Arthur C. Clarke shortlist instead.