2025 Hugo Finalists: The Ministry of Time

This post is part of the series, Reading the 2025 Hugo Finalists for Best Novel, where I am reading through all the 2025 Hugo Award Finalists for best novel. These are not book reviews. Just some scant thoughts as I think through a voting order.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradely imagines a depressing future where time travel is possible and the furthest known future is only a few hundred years away and in dire straits. So much so that the perceived "villains" of the first half of the novel end up seeming to me like the most redeemable characters in the novel. It does not end well for them in the novel's present or future and mostly I just felt bad for them by the end of the book.

To Bradely's credit, the narrator is an excellent example of a unreliable narrator. I spent much of the novel not trusting her and not liking her. The last few chapters just made that dislike even more intense -- to the point that I didn't much care about her (or the main plot) at all. In a way, that's an impressive achievement. Unfortunately for me, it made reading the novel quite unenjoyable.

In the end, as the narrator continues to selfishly pursue her singular goal with no regard for the potentially devastating side effects, I mostly felt I had read a cautionary tale about the climate future of our planet. It felt real and depressing. I need something to anchor on in the novel and it just wasn't there. The expats were certainly likeable and fun to read at times, but ultimately they were only props to the inevitable storyline that never really piqued my interest.

Aside from the time travel aspect, I struggled to think of this even as speculative fiction. It felt more like a very slow burning spy thriller that just happened to include some time travel (i.e., most of the story could have remained roughly the same without anyone walking through a time door).