All nominees were pretty good this year and there are many past winners who were (much) worse than any of the nominees. Another nice detail was that there were no second or third parts this time; all novels were stand-alone works, or the first parts of their series, so they were also more eligible than many earlier nominees for that reason. The exact order of the novels was difficult to decide, however, as said, there wasn’t anything really bad. A few of the works were a bit heavy-handed with slightly ponderous writing which, in places, wasn’t easy to go through. I decided to put in the first place the book which was the most entertaining and which was, by far, the most exciting to read. The writing in it perhaps wasn’t so ”artistic” as some of the other nominees, but very competent anyway. The book was supposed to be a stand-alone one, but I can easily see there might be other stories worth telling in that world. The second place goes to the imaginative use of an old trope of a soldier going through the basic training and fighting battles against a strange enemy. The third, fourth, and fifth places were very difficult to decide, I changed their order a few times, but the following was my final voting list. The City in the Middle of the Night was left in the last place, but by no means is it a bad book.
1. The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix E. Harrow (Redhook; Orbit UK)
2. The Light Brigade, by Kameron Hurley (Saga; Angry Robot UK)
3. Middlegame, by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com Publishing)
4. A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine (Tor; Tor UK)
5. Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir (Tor.com Publishing)
6. The City in the Middle of the Night, by Charlie Jane Anders (Tor; Titan)
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