[A_D_E_P_T]

2022 books? Sure.

"The Mountain in the Sea" by Ray Nayler.

"Beyond the Burn Line" by Paul MacAuley.

"Eversion" by Alastair Reynolds.

"The Thousand Earths" by Stephen Baxter. (Who, surprisingly, has never won a Hugo. This fact alone reflects very poorly on the Hugos.)

"How High We Go in the Dark" by Sequoia Nagamatsu.

I feel that all of these books were better than any of the nominated ones.

I like Ken MacLeod's Lightspeed Trilogy (thus far) too, but only one of them was published in 2022 and the series is still incomplete...

[lacker]

Ah, interesting - I did like The Mountain in the Sea, I forgot about that one. Eversion was decent too. I am going to get Beyond the Burn Line as a result of this comment's recommendation. So thanks!

[A_D_E_P_T]

McAuley's recent output (Austral, War of the Maps, Beyond the Burn Line,) has been very good -- and I'd say that those three books are all equal in terms of literary and entertainment quality.

All of them are, in a sense, the same type of story -- Person Goes on Journey Through Strange Territory -- but that's a solid foundation for a science fiction novel, and McAuley does it well, with more than enough variation to keep things interesting. Austral has near-future climate fiction and crime fiction elements; War of the Maps takes place on a Dyson Sphere around a white dwarf star in an aged and dying universe; Beyond the Burn Line is a middle-distance cautionary tale about AI and, in a sense, religion...

McAuley has a novella in this month's Asimov which is also quite similar, and also very good. "Blade and Bone" is about the sole survivors of an annihilated infantry battalion as they make their way across a hostile Mars -- which has been terraformed but is reverting to a cold and dry baseline.

This kind of engaging hard SF is, emphatically, not appreciated by the people who vote on Hugo awards. So much the worse for them, I think...