A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. This was my Nebula pick, but lost to Sarah Pinsker (which is not a tragedy. Everything on the ballot was good). It's a brilliant space opera which explores cultural colonization and conquest, speaking to a struggling nation on the borders of a vast empire. It's very much about how empire actually works. I love this book.
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. Also on the Nebula ballot. This is a very popular book that I personally found excellent, but not to my taste. I'm picky about horror and horror-adjacent stuff. (This is a dark fantasy...in space...which is an amazing concept).
The City In The Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders. Anders is going to be Unicorn Girl to me forever thanks to her fun little stunt during the Nebulas ;). This book is another exploration of colonialism, with aliens almost as good as those created by Vernor Vinge (and very much in that tradition. I'd love to ask her if she has read those books), and also a reasonably feasible description of life on a tidally-locked planet. I love this one too.
The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley. This attempts to be an anti-war novel in the tradition of Haldeman's Forever War but I personally found the timey wimey stuff confusing. And I normally do well with timey wimey stuff.
Middlegame by Seanan McGuire. This book was both good and disappointing; I like pretty much everything else I've read by McGuire better. I think she just does a better job with fairy stories. Or it's the fact that I get faintly irritated by pop culture quantum mechanics.
The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow. Redhook let this author down. They provided a 100 page excerpt. Exactly 100 pages. Nobody looked. The excerpt ended in the middle of a sentence. I feel bad that I wasn't able to fairly judge this book.
My pick: A Memory Called Empire
My prediction: Gideon the Ninth
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