Tag Archives: hugo 2026

The Cuddled Little Vice, by Elizabeth Sandifer – I’m nominating it for the Best Related Work Hugo

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Third paragraph (there are no sections):

And so it was that when Karen Berger and Dick Giordano traveled to London in February 1987 to scout talent there were in fact two writers who successfully pitched to them on the back of Alan Moore’s endorsement. The first, of course, was Grant Morrison. The other was a journalist named Neil Gaiman who had struck up a friendship with Moore after interviewing him a few years earlier. And while Morrison would find no shortage of commercial success across their battles with Moore, neither of the great magi would come anywhere close to Gaiman, who is straightforwardly the most commercially successful writer ever to emerge from comics.

This is a 60,000 word essay, a single web page on Sandifer’s Eruditorum Press website. It hasn’t been published separately (though will apparently become part of Sandifer’s projected second volume of Last War in Albion, her history of the magical rivalry between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison); but I am treating it as a book for bookblogging purposes.

This is mainly because there is a strong case for nominating it in the Best Related Work category in this year’s Hugo Awards, for which nominations open this week. In general the Hugos should not celebrate last year’s controversies; but this is an analysis of the Sandman comics, and of Gaiman’s other work, especially in the graphic medium, over several decades, taking into account what we now know about Gaiman’s personal life and appalling behaviour. It’s not so much about the scandal (though it is about that), as about how Gaiman constructed his career and everything else.

It’s not framed as a hatchet job. Sandifer starts by sympathetically analysing Gaiman’s childhood in Scientology, and the abuse that he certainly suffered at the hands of his father, Britain’s leading Scientologist. She then goes on to look at the roots of Sandman, and at the high points of the story (of which there are many) and its occasionally troubled publications history.

But the pattern of exploitation and abuse of young fans, and later of other women, began pretty early on – Dave Sim refers to one of Gaiman’s convention flings in the notorious Cerebus #186, in 1992. And it’s not at all difficult to find reflections of Gaiman’s behaviour in his work. We may contain multitudes, but perhaps not all that many.

I was a fan of Neil Gaiman. My first entry in the original version of this blog was about meeting him at a signing in Brussels. I have more of his books in my LibraryThing catalogue than for any other author bar Justin Richards, Roger Zelazny and Terrance Dicks. I had generally friendly if slightly spiky correspondence with him over Hugo stuff over the years (his last time on the final ballot was my first time administering the awards in 2017, and he wrote in 2024 to ask “why Sandman Episode 6 was ruled ineligible for the Hugos at Chengdu?” – a question to which unfortunately I did not and do not know the answer).

I will find it very difficult to open any of Gaiman’s work ever again, and yet I wanted some sort of closure for myself. This essay provides it, acknowledging the high points of Gaiman’s work but linking it to the low points of his personal life. I’m lucky; I barely knew him apart from through his writing. Other friends are much more personally devastated. Sandifer ends the essay with one of Roz Kaveney’s heartfelt poems about the end of her friendship with Gaiman. Here’s another, published on 7 February 2025:

Heart is a traitor even when it breaks.
Love friendship given cannot be returned.
All that I once thought my friend was once has burned
To trash shame ruin. Even his mistakes
His sins his crimes are of a piece with all
The things I valued. His embarrassed smile
His weighted pauses. I am certain while
He fucked those girls they’d see the shutters fall
Behind his eyes. Some random witty thought
Would take him for a moment quite elsewhere.
Sometimes I want to slap him maybe swear.
He was extraordinary until caught.
All the good times, the brilliance flawed. Hearts crack.
Yet friendship given can’t be taken back.

To a greater or lesser extent, all of us who liked the man and/or his work will have felt that betrayal, and Sandifer’s essay is an important part of moving on. I’m nominating it for this year’s Hugos, and I hope that you do too.

Shroud, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Its lamps lit very little. The colourless sheen of the arching, segmented stems, that looked more like plastic than wood or anything living. The faint flurries of the feeding fans or gills or whatever their function actually was. The limited range of the lamps the drone could mount barely cut through the sheer gloom, the curdled soup of what passed for air on Shroud. All was in shades of brown-grey, light and dark. Nothing had invested the energy into manufacturing pigments, because why put on an art show if nobody can see the pictures? Light and dark, and some yellowish tones, like old bone or diseased teeth or mustard gas. The brown of mud or excrement.

Adrian Tchaikovsky keeps doing it; this is yet another gripping story of the encounter between human explorers and a new form of alien life. The human protagonists trek across the hostile surface of a dangerous moon, and we also get viewpoint snippets from the perspective of the globe-spanning alien entity itself, as the two sides gradually come to understand more of each other, and the humans’ masterplan of converting Shroud into a hob of exploitation becomes less and less realistic. It’s really vivid, and Tchaivkovsky plays fair with the reader, with a coherent and credibly built world. Good stuff. You can get Shroud here.

Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction, by Paul Kincaid

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Second paragraph of third essay (on The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction, by Mark Bould and Sherry Vint):

It is clear that this volume is intended as a teaching aid, primarily for undergraduates with little or no previous acquaintance with the genre. In this it works well: it is brisk and breezy, throws in enough theory to seem serious without being weighty, and lets much of the argument rest on the numerous booklists that are embedded throughout the text. The booklists constantly direct the reader outside the text, and while no work that appears in a list is allowed any substantive discussion in the text, taken alone the lists do act as a reasonable if far from comprehensive guide to many of the most significant works of the genre. So, as a starting point for someone coming fresh to the study of the genre, you could do far worse. It’s not perfect, there are inevitably omissions, and the fact that any work discussed in the body of the book is excluded from any list leads to problems, one of the more egregious of which I’ll discuss later. The authors do make every effort to avoid gender or racial bias, making a point throughout the work of discussing books by women or non-white authors equally with those by white males. Though there are moments when this seems to prioritise a minor work by a woman over a major work by a man, in the main this can only be celebrated. With this in mind, it is a pity that, in a genre that is becoming increasingly international, they confine their discussion almost entirely to Anglophone authors. While some authors in translation are unavoidable (Verne, Čapek), authors like Lem and the Strugatsky brothers are mentioned only in a passage about Science Fiction Studies and none of their titles is even listed; others fare even less well.

A substantial collection of essays by Paul Kincaid, who is one of the few people to have been both Administrator of the Hugo Awards and a judge for the Arthur C. Clarke Award (the other two are David Langford, and me). They are almost all reviews of other critical works, hence the title, with commentary inserted by the author to contextualise and explain a little more. I had read very few of the books described here, so it made me realise how much more there is to read about sf, and will spur me to add some more to my bookshelves

While I particularly enjoyed the pieces on Brian Aldiss and Ursula Le Guin, I’m afraid I am still unconvinced of the added value of the Marxist analysis of Frederic James and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, or of the literary merits of M. John Harrison; but maybe that proves Kincaid’s larger point, that there can be no single definition of science fiction, which he pushes in a gentlemanly way. I learned a lot from this, as I had expected. You can get Colourfields here.

The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Kenning was right underneath their new visitor. What was she doing?

Emily Tesh again shows her extraordinary versatility, with a story of a queer teacher in charge of safeguarding vulnerable pupils at a magical boarding school against dark forces while securing her own back against bureaucratic enemies. This is contemporary Britain, but with demons and a professional structure for the magically talented people who control them; it’s also a Britain where our friends class and race are alive and well, especially in a school where some of the scholarship pupils are also orphans. There’s cracking emotional chemistry as well between Sapphire Walden, the damaged but still idealistic protagonist, and her love interests; and finely observed dynamics of how a small group of gifted teenagers interact with the outside world.

It’s brilliant stuff, and really it makes you realize how few of the well-known magic school stories, from Roke to Hogwarts to the Scholomance, tell the story from the viewpoint of the teachers rather than the pupils. (There’s Unseen University in Discworld, but it’s a third-level institution rather than school and it also seems to have very few students.) Of course there’s always mileage in a rite-of-passage story, but the children’s point of view sees only the part of the educational iceberg that is above the surface. If you see what I mean.

Anyway, you can get The Incandescent here, and you should.