I loved pretty much everything about Rebecca Roanhorse's Black Sun: the world building, the characters, the plot, etc. I have more Hugo nominees to read, but I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up being my #1 pick.
I often enjoy fantasy that isn't rehashing Tolkien's medieval European-inspired fantasy. I love Tolkien and a very small number of his imitators, but fantasy can be so much more than endless iterations of vaguely-medieval-English-boy-finds-magic-item-and-goes-on-vaguely-medieval-English-quest. (I also love GRRM, but at the end of the day he's giving a grittier variation on a Tolkienesque theme).
I enjoyed Roanhorse's other work, but I was super excited when I heard she was writing a high fantasy inspired by the histories and cultures of the Americas (especially Mesoamerican cultures). In the afterword, she expresses her own frustration with Eurocentric fantasy, and I'm pleased to say that she does a fantastic job, joining the ranks of other recent explorations of non-Eurocentric fantasy by N. K. Jemisin, Fonda Lee, and others, but while giving her own stamp on the genre.
The #1 rule of fantasy and science fiction world building is that the world should feel bigger than what we see on the page or screen. And Roanhorse does a magnificent job of that. There are even two maps! (Although I would love a glossary, too) The world feels expansive and lived-in, with the sense that there's a long history and large geography behind and beyond the actions of the novel.
While I often enjoy world building for its own sake, the characters are great, too. There's a high ranking priest of humble origins in the religious capital far to the north, a young man of religious importance and magic powers on a mysterious quest, and a delightfully scruffy sea captain with her own magic who is sprung from jail and hired for a strange journey. The characters, like the world, all feel real because there's more behind them than meets the eye. The sea captain, for example, initially looks like a standard urban fantasy-style badass, but she has surprising depth and vulnerability once we get to know her.
The plot is interesting enough to keep us going. The characters have a place to be and a time to get there. I'm not sure I caught all the intrigue behind it all, but the basic idea kept me interested.
Once you start thinking about it, Eurocentrism runs pretty deep in many places, such as my home country of the United States, but also even in many postcolonial non-Western countries. Here's a thought experiment: think of "life in the year 1300." Most people (at least here in the US) probably think of medieval England or maybe some other place in Western Europe, but why is that? It's just one small part of the world!
Maybe because popular culture in general and fantasy in particular sets the narrative of what counts as "life in the year 1300." In fact, it's debatable whether terms like "medieval" even really apply to history in other parts of the world, although obviously a lot of stuff was going on during those centuries.
So by shifting the framework of fantasy to the indigenous cultures of the Americas, Roanhorse is doing some heavy philosophical lifting to subvert the Eurocentric frameworks that dominate in many places, like the US or in the contemporary fantasy genre with genealogical ties to Tolkien.
But as the characters of Black Sun show us, we can't just avoid the histories and cultures from which we arise and which made us who we are. As many postcolonial theorists point out, we can't just go back to some nostalgia-tinted precolonial past.
But we can, with a lot of philosophical effort, work to change the direction of things going forward by recognizing that there are histories and cultures beyond Europe that have been and will continue to influence humanity into the future. And that, along with some great characters and world building, is part of the key to Roanhorse's brilliance in Black Sun. It's also why I'm overjoyed that it made the Hugo short list this year, and why I would not at all be surprised if it wins.
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