The Final Season (by Andrew Gillsmith)

This was the most difficult RHC category for me this year, and still not sure if I nailed it, but I read this for a book that went under the radar in 2023." The question of course is what radar? Whose radar? Recommendations in the Goodreads group included a bunch of novels from the Tournament of Books short and longlist. They do find a lot of relatively niche books, but they are by definition on the ToB radar, so they're on the radar, so then they don't count! 

Someone suggested looking for books with a small number of reviews and ratings, and I think a random rec list had this book on it. Not only is it low on reviews and ratings, it isn't carried by any of my libraries, so I bought it. And as a humorous sci-fi book, I would fully expect it to show up on The Big Idea series on Scalzi's Whatever blog, which definitely counts as "the radar" for sci-fi, but it hasn't. (Dear Andrew Gillsmith: Scalzi readers would be so into this, you should get on The Big Idea when you publish the next one in the series.) 

Anyway, the book itself! It's a Douglas Adams-style book about a reality series that's been watching a doomed planet for 10,000 years. The planet's apocalypse is about to happen, and the showrunner has the opportunity to save the planet's inhabitants. But will she? A fun, funny read and really I do think it would be a hit with fans of Agent to the Stars or Hitchhiker's Guide.