2026 Hugo Novella Nominations ("The River Has Roots", "What Moves the Dead", "Cinder House", "Automatic Noodle", "The Summer War", "Murder by Memory")

 Hi everyone!  Ok, this is a fun one.  A few weeks ago, the list of nominees for the Hugo's Best Novella award were announced, and I realized that I'd already read three of them and owned the other three.  Meant to put this post up last week, but I've been travelling, life got in the way, you know how it goes.  But these books were a joy to read, and I'd love to share them with you all

In general, I've honestly really embraced the novella in recent years.  Credit to Tor and Tordotcom in particular for pushing here.  But especially for speculative fiction, novella-length is a really fantastic size to build a world and tell a story.  In particular, novellas allow for character development in a way that short stories don't, while not being overly concerned with complicated plotting like a full novel or series must be.  It flexes muscles not normal flexed, and I really do recommend it for anyone who's short on reading time.  In addition to these books, let me know if you want any other novella recs!

With that, let's get started (although tl;dr, if I had a vote, I'd probably give it to either "The Summer War" or "Murder by Memory")

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"The River Has Roots" by Amal El-Mohtar

Funny to start with this one, as if I were a betting man (and I'm not) I'd say this is the clear favorite to win the award.  Ever since the truly fantastic "This is How You Lose the Time War" by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, we've all been waiting for Amal El-Mohtar's solo work.  This is the longest fiction she's published (although both her poetry and short fiction are wonderful), and it was certainly worth the wait

While I despair of pundits trying to analyze "who did what?" when discussing combined works . . . art is not arithmetic, you can't just say (the style of "Time War") - (the style observed in Max Gladstone's other work) == (Amal El-Mohtar) . . . it's undeniable that everything El-Mohtar touches has that little half-step out of our boring reality and into a more fantastic one.  And so, this story about a woman who falls in love with a fairy and the choices she has to make because of it . . . yeah.  It's real good

Fairyland appear to be the "in" theme lately (we had demons for a bit there, multiverses before that, I could probably think of a few others), and I'm not mad about that at all.  If nothing else, "The River Has Roots" is clearly in my Top 2 Hugo-nominated-novellas-in-which-a-queer-character-travels-to-fairyland of 2025

I gave my love a cherry that has no stone / I gave my love a chicken that has no bone / I gave my love a story that has no end / I gave my love a country, with no borders to defend

 

A cherry when it’s bloomin’, it has no stone / A chicken when it’s pippin’, it has no bone / The story that I love you, it has no end / A country in surrender, has no borders to defend

tags:  Fairy and Folk Tales, Queer Lit, Standalone

"What Moves the Dead" by T. Kingfisher

Ok so I lied, sorry, this is not actually the nominee.  The nominee is "What Stalks the Deep", but that's the third novella in this series.  I general, I figure I should either review a whole series or just the first book in the series, since there's no real point in reviewing Book 3 on its own

So yes, "What Moves the Dead."  Well what had happened was, Ursula Vernon, aka T. Kingfisher, was reading the classic Poe story "The Fall of the House of Usher" and said to herself, "there's more to this story.  I think I can do more, here.  And what the hell is up with those mushrooms???" (incidentally, completely unbeknownst to Vernon, Silvia Moreno-Garcia was having the exact same thoughts at almost the same time, but that's a topic for a different post)

The twist, as it were, is the main character.  This book is set in a society that has a complete gender and set of pronouns for soldiers, regardless of their gender assigned at birth.  By placing this character (a nonbinary war veteran with PTSD) into our Poe story, Verno is quite subtly saying, "hey, turns out gender isn't all that important, huh?  Imagine that," in a very pleasant way

This is part of an ongoing series, and each novella is excellent.  "What Moves the Dead" is this retelling of the Poe story, "What Feasts at Night" is more of a classic Romanian folklore horror story, and "What Stalks the Deep" (actually the 2026 Hugo nominee) veers slightly Lovecraftian.  Vernon (in her guise as T. Kingfisher) has quietly put together an entire career out of really, really dependably good books in which a nice and unique main character gets placed into a magical world and set loose to have fun

Once, on a ship in the Mediterranean, I saw the sea glow with a thousand motes of blue light. Plankton, the first mate told me. Bioluminescent plankton. After he walked away, one of the sailors said, “Don’t listen to him, sir. The dead carry lanterns down in the deep.”

tags:  Dark Fantasy, Queer Lit, Series (ongoing), Supernatural Horror

"Cinder House" by Freya Marske

This is a good one!  Another of the classic "modern twist on fairy tales" subgenre that's been popular lately, Freya Marske does a great job of it (I am, to be honest, embarassed at how long it took me to realize what story is being retold.  The wicked stepmother and two stepsisters, the fairy helping her, even the title of the book and it still took me like a third of the way through.  I'm not a clever person).  The "twist" here is that our main character . . . is dead.  She dies in the opening scene, and is inextricably tied to the house in which she died--forced to still do the bidding of the current occupants, made all the more terrible because they're the ones who killed her and her father

Both the appeal and the stress of this book is questioning, wondering, doubting if it's possible to get to a happily ever after.  There are twists and turns, both the ones expected from the original story and some new ones.  There's some nice romance, including some spicy scenes if that's what you're into.  And more importantly, there is compassion--compassion for a young woman in a truly awful situation.  Does it all work out for her in the end?  I dunno, you'll have to read it yourself

Scholar Mazamire’s own theory was that a ghost was how a building held a grudge, because it was not human enough to do it on its own. Ella read that sitting on the roof, and felt a throb of harsh contentment that went all the way down the main chimney and glowed in the ashes of the hearth like anger—her own anger, the house’s anger, yes, which remembered her death and her father’s, and would never be quenched.

“I was an odd little girl. My father always told me so. And I’d been looking forward to being an odd young woman, except now I’m a haunting. I’m a ghost and a house and there’s no room for anything else. Of all the things I lost when I died, perhaps it’s silly I mourn that, but … I do. I hate that my oddness got chosen for me.”

tags:  Dark Fantasy, Fairy and Folk Tales, Standalone

"Automatic Noodle" by Annalee Newitz

Similar to "The River Has Roots", this novel is definitely one of the frontrunners to win the award.  Newitz is a joy, and has quietly put out a number of fantastic stories parallel to her much-lauded career as a journalist and editor (the EFF, Gawker, i09, Gizmodo)--in particular, "Future of Another Timeline" is a modern classic in feminist scifi

"Automatic Noodle" is Newitz's foray into the in-vogue "cozy" subgenre.  For those that don't know, cozy fantasy (and in this case, cozy scifi) are deliberately low-stakes stories where nobody is trying to save the world or anything, just make it work with their own lives.  Opening a cafe or a bookstore or a teashop is a pretty common motif, and when they're well-written they're a pretty nice little "slice of life" relaxing read

In this one, Newitz is telling a story set in the near future, after a short but brutal war in which California fought for independence from "Yankeeland" with the help of autonomous robots.  These robots now operate on the edges of society, separate but equal and still subject to intense discrimination.  But when a group of robots comes back online to find themselves at loose ends, they do what seems natural to them--open up a noodle restaurant.  It's a story about dealing with the haters and putting more stock in the to the opinions of people who respect you.  And that's a good lesson

No matter what we do, people will always hate us. We made shitty food, and they hated it. And then, when we make the very best food we possibly can, they hate that too. I guarantee those reviews are not from people who actually ate our food. Those are Vigilance Committee cranks who want to live in the 2020s again. Hands pushed themself slightly out of their hole, still moping. Then they squeezed Cayenne’s arm gently. I wish there was a way to make something so perfect that even the haters would have to admit that robots can make beautiful things.

tags:  Cozy, Near-future, Postapocalypse, Standalone, Uplifting

"The Summer War" by Naomi Novik

Naomi Novik already proved that she does very good "updated fairy tales" when she wrote "Uprooted" and "Spinning Silver" (based on Rapunzel and Rumpelstilstkin, respectively).  However in this, she writes a wholly original fairy tale, and wow does she knock it out of the park.  If anything, she was either directly paying homage to "The King of Elfland's Daughter" or her subconscious was working overdrive, because 

The book opens in the aftermath of the "Summer War", in which the creatures of the Summer Lands have made peace with the mortal realm.  Our main character is the daughter of the Earl who defeated the armies of Summer, and in the early part of the book she learns that she is one of the few human sorcerers--a fact she learns in a heartbreaking way, as she inadvertently curses her beloved brother out of anger at him leaving home:  

“Go to the Summer Lands! Go ride a shaihul, fight a dragon, be the greatest knight who ever lived. Just see if it makes you happy! I hope you meet a hundred beautiful summerling boys and none of them love you. I hope no one else is ever stupid enough to love you again!”

And so their paths diverge, he off on his adventures in the Summer Lands, and her left behind in our mortal realm.  Each of them on an adventure in very, very different ways.  This is a book about loss, and about anger, and about grudges, and about betrayal, and yeah . . . if we want to be cheesy, it's about the way that love can defeat all of those things

Oh, and it's also in my Top 2 Hugo-nominated-novellas-in-which-a-queer-character-travels-to-fairyland of 2025, hah

tags:  Fairy and Folk Tales, Fantasy, Queer Lit, Standalone

"Murder by Memory" by Olivia Waite

Funny that this is last in order, because it is by far the most original book on this list.  And man, is it a good one.  To be fair, I love detective stories, and I love scifi, so if you're writing a far-future detective story you're already like 80% of the way to convincing me to get your book.  Add in a unique twist, and you're basically already there

This is a detective story set on a far-future spaceship, a unique version of a generation ship.  Each person has a "book" and a "body"--the book is the record of their brain pattern, which is kept in the ship's storage; this book can be downloaded into a body, and when that body "wears out" as it were, you can simply be transferred to a newly cloned body.  It's functional immorality . . . unless someone manages to erase the book too

Our main character, the detective (a delightful old lady, man old lady detectives are the best), was in fact in a period of rest.  She wakes up not in her own body (which wasn't ready), but emergency downloaded into a new host--this feels weird, but it's not a problem on the ship, as the body is just a shell and the person who "should" be occupying that shell can simply be redownloaded later.  Which is kind of the plan . . . until our main character starts to suspect that the body she is currently occupying may in fact be the murderer's

. . . and if that synopsis doesn't make you immediately want to pick up this book, well huh, you and I are just different people

“A shadow council.”  

 

“Of a sort, yes.” It certainly wasn’t the first time I’d heard such rumors. Humans were remarkably consistent in some ways: they imagined something noble like justice or virtue, and the very next thing they’d think up was its opposite.

tags:  Cozy, Science Fiction, Series (ongoing), Space Opera

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And so here we are!  Man, this was a fun set of books to read.  As always, let me know if you want to read any of these and talk about them.  Cheers!

I loved these books