I've consumed two things from the 2025 Hugo Award shortlist recently. They're Quite Different.

The first was The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett. I loved this; it's a crime thriller set in a fantasy world, where The Empire exists to keep its people safe from Leviathans. It has a lot of what you'd expect from the crime genre; whilst a couple of times that meant that I spotted the plot twist or reveal coming, there was still plenty here to keep me guessing (and turning the pages). It also talks about power and money (and how those with both can often keep clear of the law), and perhaps something about how we treat those who aren't the same as ourselves. There are some quite gruesome bits. I have a suspicion that there may be a sequel or two, which I look forward to reading :)

Flow is an animated film without any dialogue. After some apocalypse that has removed all of humanity, a flood comes, and a little cat (our point-of-view character) is nearly swept away. Over time it meets and befriends some other animals, and they have adventures together. This is not a plot-driven film, and I think works better if thought of as a poem in cinematic form. There are moments of very authentical animal behaviour, and also some rather less plausible ones (like animals being able to operate a tiller). I would have liked to have seen this on a big screen, I think.

I've recently been watching Shetland on iPlayer. It's a pretty good crime series set on Shetland. After a bit of a wait, I got Raven Black, the first of the books on which the series is based, from the library.

It's not the first novel to be adapted (they did Red Bones, the third book, first), so it's possible some of the changes relate to events that will happen later in book-canon, but I was quite surprised at how different the book and TV were. The main plot is quite similar (in terms of who killed whom and why), but there are changes even then (Magnus Bain's involvement in historic events, particularly), but there are number of quite significant changes to characters - Tosh doesn't appear at all, and book-Cassie is a young girl still living with her mother, whilst Perez is significantly less sympathetic (in particular around his opinions on Sandy). And the solution in the book seems quite rabbit-from-a-hat, even when I knew who the killer was in advance.

I am undecided if I want to try and read more of the books by Ann Cleeves, but it was certainly interesting to read Raven Black (and unusual for me to be coming to the book-canon second rather than first).

ETA: There's a short film Alison O'Donnell Remembers: Shetland where the actor who plays Tosh talks about how and why the character was developed for the TV adaptation.

Again, in reading order:

美食三品 (Tasting the Future Delicacy Three Times), 宝树 / Baoshu. What if you could experience food as another eats it? Quite a nice story, but I found the biology hard to swallow...

The Sound of Children Screaming, Rachael K. Jones. An angry story about gun violence in schools.

The Mausoleum’s Children, Aliette de Bodard. A strange and well-sketched world, with some good twists.

How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub, P. Djèlí Clark. What could possibly go wrong? I'm afraid I found the plot here a bit too obvious.

Better Living Through Algorithms, Naomi Kritzer. I was expecting this to head for one of two obvious cliché endings (and thus to be annoying), but actually it went elsewhere and I thought it was pretty good.

Answerless Journey, Han Song (tr. Alex Woodend). Two people wake up on a spaceship without their memories; an interesting idea, but it needed some answers to actually be engaging.

In order-of-reading:

The Year Without Sunshine, Naomi Kritzer. A story of a neighbourhood coming together to deal with the eponymous calamity; more optimistic than a lot of the things I've read recently, almost too much so.

One Man’s Treasure, Sarah Pinsker. Another story about exploitation; I liked the world-building and the plot.

On the Fox Roads, Nghi Vo. The Fox Roads may appear for you if you really need to run away from something. Here we have people running away from home, and maybe finding new ones.

Ivy, Angelica, Bay, C. L. Polk. Witchcraft, and other ways to protect your neighbourhood. A twisty tale, with plenty of heart. I think my favourite of these.

Introduction to 2181 Overture, Second Edition, Gu Shi (tr. Emily Jin). A slightly confusingly-told story about the societal impact of being able to "cryosleep" for a few decades. I'm not sure the framing story actually helped here, and I found the writing a bit clunky, but there are interesting ideas.

I AM AI, Ai Jiang. Another corporate dystopia; unfortunately, I didn't really find the point of view character particularly compelling, so this fell rather flat for me.

Thornhedge, T. Kingfisher. A telling of Sleeping Beauty that wonders if there was good reason for the sleeper to be enchanted thus. I enjoyed the narrative voice (and unusual choice of narrator), and the sense of the otherness of fairy; and the shape of the story and its twists.

Rose/House, Arkady Martine. A nice mash-up of locked-room, haunted house, and noir, even if a little too self-referential in calling out its own genre clichés. I loved the setting and the growing sense of menace, but what is going to keep it off the top spot for me is the ending, which felt a little too ill-defined. Rather like this week's Dr Who episode, if you're going to build up a great mystery, then just leaving the viewer/reader guessing at the end can feel very unsatisfactory.

I've now read all of these (although I didn't write a review of Some Desperate Glory when I read it some time back), so time to vote.

1. The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, Shannon Chakraborty
2. Witch King, Martha Wells
3. Some Desperate Glory, Emily Tesh
4. Translation State, Ann Leckie
5. The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra Chandrasekera
6. Starter Villain, John Scalzi

I'm hoping the voter packet will be out soon, as otherwise tracking down all the short fiction will become tedious...

There's a lot of interesting ideas in this book, some plot twists that sneak up on you, and a strange yet believable setting. But somehow it didn't quite work for me. I like that it's not a typical hero's journey sort of book, but the effect of this is that it feels like the point of view character has very little agency; things happen to them for reasons which are often unclear (and for reasons that often don't even become clear later on). And I'm afraid that left me feeling rather disengaged from the narrative, too.

That's a shame, because the start is arresting, there are a number of nicely-drawn characters, and a very twisty plot that doesn't feel contrived. And there is a lot being said about violence, racism, empire, and trying to grow up as yourself rather than what your parents want you to be; I can see why this book has had a lot of rave reviews.

I think this is the first non-Murderbot book by Martha Wells that I've read. Kai, the main character, wakes up in a sticky situation, and there are two narratives through the book: one in the present where he tries to work out how and why he ended up in that sticky situation, and one in The Past where we find out about Kai's back-story and the recent history of the world.

I found this really hard to put down; granted some of that was because the book tends to shift between the two narratives at cliff-hangers, but also because I wanted to learn more about the world and to see what would happen next. I've seen criticism online that few of the characters other than Kai are particularly fleshed out, and I think that's fair, but then Kai is a very interesting character. It's not a book that holds your hand in terms of the world-building, but I didn't find that a problem.

There is quite a bit of violence (and the sort of large-scale death attendant on warfare), and I think some of what Wells wants to talk about is the impact of that sort of large-scale trauma on people and societies, but I think there is also hope here, and examples of people trying hard to do better and work together.

It feels like space has been left for a sequel (though one is not currently planned, I gather), which I would very much enjoy reading, but this is a good stand-alone story.

This is a sequel to Into the Spider-Verse, which I rather enjoyed. I'm afraid I was less happy with this film. Part of it is the lack of adequate ending; this just sort of stops (with some cliff-hangers) ready for the next film in the series. Partly it's that the multiverse thing is less new than it was in the previous film, and the whole musing-on-canon-thing feels too much like a plot device than something that really makes sense.

The action sequences are really good, though, and there's plenty of nice details that go flying past. And maybe the sequel will make it all worthwhile...

On my recent travels I got through a fair few ebooks, mostly borrowed from the library:

Starling House, by Alix E Harrow, is set in a dying coal town in Kentucky; Starling House is an old manor house owned by a reclusive family, and avoided by the townsfolk. But Opal (the narrator) is poor and desperate, so ends up taking a job there. And the horrors of the past refuse to go away. This is a gothic fantasy book that worked for me on a number of levels - it's a great page-turner, with plenty to say about poverty and slavery, and has some nice ideas about how stories get told & retold along the way. I'm a bit surprised to not see it on the Hugo shortlist.

The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi, by Shannon Chakraborty is on the Hugo shortlist, and it's great fun (I'd seen it being plugged in paperback in Waterstones, which is why I picked it up in ebook from the library). Amina (who narrates the story to a scribe) is a middle-aged mother and retired pirate captain in mediaeval Oman (but with magic) who is forced out of retirement for one more heist. The setting felt real, and the narrator's struggles with their wavering Islamic faith likewise genuine; and I liked that Amina's age, experience, and family ties were strengths to her character. Perhaps some aspects of the plot were a little far-fetched, but I really enjoyed this. Plus some more "here are different ways to tell the same story".

System Collapse, by Martha Wells got enough nominations to make the Hugo shortlist, but the author declined the nomination (I don't know why, but their Witch King is on the ballot). Being a Murderbot fan, I enjoyed this, although I'm not sure it has much new to offer.

Acolytes of Cthulhu, edited by Robert M. Price, was on the whole a bit of a disappointment. It's a collection of short stories, which I'd borrowed because one of them was by Neil Gaiman (though that turned out to be Shuggoth's Old Peculiar, which I've read before); while a few of them were good and/or had neat twists, on the whole they felt like a collection of pot-boilers or pastiches.

Of the Hugo finalists this year, I've read two of the novels (the other being Some Desperate Glory), one (Bea Wolf) of the comics, and seen one of the long form dramatic presentations (Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves) and two of the short forms (both Dr Who episodes).