Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler, by Susana M. Morris

Posted on 22 June 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

To the uninitiated listener, this declaration might seem like a commonsense perspective on government that uplifts self-reliance and community engagement. But Reagan’s speech was a clear signal to those in the know that he intended to return to a version of the country that existed before the sea change of cultural shifts that happened during the 1960s and 1970s. After all, his campaign’s slogan was “Let’s Make America Great Again,” with “again” being the operative word. This speech and the values it lauded would help to shape the scope of the modern conservative movement by deemphasizing the role of the federal government in favor of states exerting more power.²
² See Lee Edwards, A Brief History of the Modern American Conservative Movement (Heritage Foundation, 2004); Allan J. Lichtman, White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement (Grove Press, 2008); and John C. Skipper, The 1964 Republican Convention: Barry Goldwater and the Beginning of the Conservative Movement (McFarland, 2016).

Another of this year’s Best Related Work Hugo finalists, and the last of the four books on the ballot that I got to. (The other two are a 2.5 hour long video, and the Hugo Spreadsheet of Doom.) This is a good, detailed look at the life and work of Octavia Butler, placing it very firmly in the political and social context of the day, and in particular showing how Butler pushed back against the right wing’s assaults on minority rights under Reagan and others. There is a lot of important stuff here. I felt however that I would have liked to hear more about Butler’s links with the science fiction literary community and with fandom, and there are also a few moments when the voices of author and subject become confusingly blended. It’s an important book but I think my first preference is going elsewhere. You can get Positive Obsession here.

So as of right now, I’m inclined to rank my Best Related Work ballot as follows:

Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction, by Paul Kincaid
Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia Butler, by Susana M. Morris
Last War in Albion: “The Cuddled Little Vice (Sandman)”, by Elizabeth Sandifer
The Hugo Spreadsheet of Doom
Ragnarök vs the Long Night
Inventing the Renaissance, by Ada Palmer

I have watched only the first part of Ragnarök vs the Long Night, which is 2.5 hours long. I must say I found the format a bit annoying. I prefer my Best Related Work vote to go to written works critically addressing the genre, and I think my top three do that.

2026 Hugos: Best Novella

Posted on 13 June 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

1) The River Has Roots, by Amal El-Mohtar. Second paragraph of third chapter:

When people say that voices run in families, they mean it as inheritance—that something special has been passed down the generations, like the slope of a nose or the set of a jaw. But Esther and Ysabel Hawthorn had voices that ran together like raindrops on a windowpane. Their voices threaded through each other like the warp and weft of fine cloth, and when the sisters harmonized, the air shimmered with it. Folk said that when they sang together, you could feel grammar in the air. If they sang a stormy sky, the day clouded over. If they sang adventure, blood rose to the boil. If they sang a sweet sadness, everything looked a little silver from the corners of the eyes.

As I said previously, a delightful, dark and queer fairy-tale of life, language and love in the liminal spaces. Get it here.

2) What Stalks the Deep, by T. Kingfisher. Second paragraph of third chapter:

“Certainly,” I said. I had made an attempt at folding my clothes back into my trunk, which Angus was in the process of correcting. “What’s on your mind?”

Great Lovecraftian tale of horrors in West Virgian coal mines, in the same sequence as What Moves the Dead (my 2023 vote) and What Feasts at Night (2025 finalist). Get it here.

3) The Summer War, by Naomi Novik. Second paragraph of third chapter:

But now Father was the one who had made the stupid mistake. Celia knew that Father didn’t care that Argent liked boys; nothing like that ever mattered to him. What he did care about was that if people knew that Argent liked boys, it would give the king an excuse to refuse to give him a royal princess for his wife, and maybe even to disinherit him. Father had just been trying to teach Argent not to get caught, and it had never occurred to him that Argent wanted love more than power.

Fantasy story of magic, sibling relationships, chivalry, and queer fairy-like races. A lot going on. Get it here.

4) Cinder House, by Freya Marske. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Ella didn’t have a will. And with two silent corpses it was easy for the living to dictate the timeline. Ella fell down the stairs, yes, such a terrible accident, and died first. And her father’s heart stopped from grief when it happened.

Reworking of Cinderella as a ghost story. Good and creepy. Get it here.

5) Murder by Memory, by Olivia Waite. Second paragraph of third chapter:

Vast round windows in both bow and stern, like the domes of some sideways cathedral, now flickering with the green-and-purple auroras of magnetic disturbances. Ramps and lifts up and down between decks, abandoned from the storm and the lateness of the hour. The diamond patterns of the metal railings, turning shadows into stripes. Doors both simple and ornate, flanked by planters and chairs. Flats and home shops and small cafés, vanishing into the distance, an entire small city flowering as it sped through the great dark nothing.

There seems to be a real fashion for murders on spaceships these days, doesn’t there? Some good descriptive writing but I felt the body-swapping plot didn’t quite hang together. Get it here.

6) Automatic Noodle, by Annalee Newitz. Second paragraph of third section:

The octobot may have been designed for search-and-rescue, but their real obsession had always been business. When the Army upgraded them with an olfactory-gustatory sensor array called NosyMouth—good for sniffing out dangerous chemicals!—they realized there was money to be made using the device’s “taster” features. Humans would pay almost anything for a good meal, especially in times of hardship. All the most successful entrepreneurs of the wartime era had been in the food business. Even in a wrecked post-war economy, you could always find a market for things that tasted delicious.

I hate cute robots, and this is a story about cute robots setting up a noodle store in San Francisco in a newly independent California. One of the cute robots is actually called ‘Sweetie’. Get it here.

The top four of these are all great stories, and it may just be my personal prejudices blinding me to the merits of the other two.

Three graphic novels from the Hugo ballot: The Space Cat, Absolute Wonder Woman Vol 1, The Power Fantasy Vol 1

Posted on 10 June 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Here is half of the Hugo ballot for Best Graphic Story or Comic, in my order of preference.

The Space Cat, by Nnedi Okorafor and Tana Ford

First page of third chapter (slightly varying from my usual practice):

This is hilarious and fun – writer Nnedi Okorafor and her daughter have a cat which secretly flies into space on secret missions at night, as well as getting up to the usual cat tricks. There are some glorious moments of observation. It’s not getting my top vote in this category (that’s yet to come) but it will get a decent preference from me. You can get The Space Cat here.

Absolute Wonder Woman Vol 1: The Last Amazon, by Kelly Thompson et al

Second frame of Part 3:

I’m not especially well versed in the Wonder Woman universe, but it turns out not to matter, because this has a divergent timeline from the usual Wonder Woman narrative, and takes up the question of what it would be like if Wonder Woman was raised in the Underworld rather than by the Amazons. I enjoyed it without being very invested in it. You can get Absolute Wonder Woman Vol 1: The Last Amazon here.

The Power Fantasy, Vol 1: The Superpowers, by Kieron Gillen, Caspar Wijngaard et al

Second frame of third part:

This is the first of a series about six superhumans dotted around the world, battling each other and different governments. It didn’t do much for me. You can get The Power Fantasy, Vol 1: The Superpowers here.

2026 Hugos: Best Novelette

Posted on 6 June 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

I thought the top two of these were very good, the next two OK, and while I have my own reasons for not rating the bottom two, I am sure that they will have a wider appeal to voters.

1) “The Millay Illusion” by Sarah Pinsker

Second paragraph of third section

You will be asking why she would have gone to the expense and effort of arranging this event. (What I think: She wanted to be known on her own merits, and she wanted to be respected, to demonstrate once and for all that her act was her own. She wanted her name, her chosen name, to be associated with her skill and ingenuity; I still can’t understand why or how she walked away.)

Story of stage magic and girl power. I had been planning to mark it down as not being sfnal enough until I got to the end. Beautifully evocative.

2) “The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For” by Cameron Reed

Second paragraph of third section:

I remember being alone here, having no one but the guards to talk to. Mira shouldn’t have to live like that. Most of the guards are nice and you can learn a lot from them, but some of what you learn’s depressing. Usually borrowing money to take an enhanced body was the only way they could find work. Then most of every payday goes toward servicing the debt.

Dynastic dysphoria in a dystopia, and love that transgresses cruelly set boundaries.

3) “Never Eaten Vegetables” by H.H. Pak

Second paragraph of third section:

“Hello,” says the frog.

Generation starship with all kinds of issues between bottled brains and AIs. Some cute stuff but felt it wasn’t fully under control.

4) “When He Calls Your Name” by Catherynne M. Valente

Second paragraph of third section:

She walked like a man. I do remember that. Not like she was making a big point about it either. It wasn’t a showy thing. She just walked across my property like it could be hers any old time. Without apologizing to the space she moved through. Without curling her shoulders in out of sheer embarrassment that she’d gone out and bothered the air. Frankly, it made me uncomfortable. My head wanted to tell my heart it was tied up in fits because that woman walked along like yet another thing that belonged to me had always been hers. But my heart wouldn’t have it. My heart knew it was mad as marbles because I could’ve been walking through the world just like that this whole time, only I never thought to.

Narrator’s husband has been seduced by the neighbourhood vampire, who drops by for a muddy-the-air chat. I found it a bit too close to horror for my taste.

5) “Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy” by Martha Wells

Second paragraph of third section:

Tarik got the hatch open and Iris flashed her light over the dark space inside. It was just a corridor, dark metal walls scratched with graffiti, mostly symbols she didn’t recognize. Ladsen and Sunara, both suddenly all business, stepped immediately toward the walls, taking out their recording interfaces. “Is it Pre-CR?” Matteo asked.

A Murderbot story which I bounced off as usual (it will probably win). I thought the plot only went half way.

6) “Kaiju Agonistes” by Scott Lynch

Second paragraph of third section:

The seed-planters designed its consciousness to grow slowly, adjusting gently to each new unfolding of comprehension. Two hundred thousand local years would be a long time for any living thing to cling to an undersea ledge, let alone something with the power to wreak planetary havoc. Psychological stability must be assured in a monstrous visitation from the stars.

Godzilla as an Awful Warning planted by well-meaning alien overseers. My suspension of disbelief was knocked by too many anachornisms and inaccuracies.

Inventing the Renaissance, by Ada Palmer

Posted on 4 June 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Thus, if we’re in the middle of the Cold War, and an influential historian publishes a book magnifying old discussions from Max Weber and Sombart arguing that the X-Factor that sparked the Renaissance was the rise of banking and the merchant class, triggered by the invention of double-entry bookkeeping, America can grab that book to say: The Renaissance was the birth of capitalism! Clearly the Renaissance’s true successor is modern western capitalist regimes! The fact that it was a golden age proves capitalism will make a golden age as well! And communism is the bad Dark Ages! If, on the other hand, we’re in the nineteenth-century rise-of-nationalism period, and someone argues that the X-Factor that sparked the Renaissance was the idea of Italy as a united nation first articulated in the late 1300s, and that the Renaissance golden age ended because Italy was conquered by outside powers, then the Renaissance can be claimed as a predecessor, not only by the Italian unification movement, but by the German unification movement, and any nationalist movement, all claiming a golden Renaissance will come when peoples become nations. Thus, each time someone (usually a historian) proposes a new X-Factor for the Renaissance, it sparks a new wave of opportunities to claim the Renaissance as a source of legitimacy.

I got this because it is on this year’s Hugo ballot for Best Related Work, but to cut to the chase, I’m not voting for it because it is not actually a work that is related to science fiction or fantasy, other than the fact that its writer is well known as a science fiction writer. I have read the author’s spirited defence of its relevance to the genre, and I am not convinced. This is not a book about sf, it is a book that does what it says on the tin and explains about the Renaissance. I will not be giving it a preference on my Hugo ballot.

Not that it’s a bad book – quite the reverse. It’s very readable and breezy, and makes some very good points about how the Renaissance is read, and by whom. There are some great anecdotes and also some quite profound analytical points. We keep coming back to Machiavelli (and to an extent Petrarch) but that’s only reasonable given their later influence. It’s also interesting to have the science of the period situated so firmly in the other cultural endeavours of the day; I have tended to read work that segregated science out, but that of course is utterly anachronistic.

I think it would have been helpful to have a few maps – I am reasonably familiar with its geography, but I can’t always keep in my head the relative locations of Florence, Siena, Pisa and Perugia, let alone remember where the boundaries of the Papal States were. And the internal geography of the major cities, Florence and Rome in particular, becomes important to the narrative.

My only other problem with the book is that it’s really very long, and absorbed a lot of reading time that I’d have preferred to give to Hugo finalists that I am more likely to vote for. But that’s a me problem, not a problem with the book.

You can get Inventing the Renaissance here.

Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe, by C.B. Lee

Posted on 29 May 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

The poor freshman gives me a confused look but tries again, blowing into his clarinet. Thomas makes a spluttering, sad excuse for a sound, then lowers the clarinet and sighs.

Next up in my reading of the Lodestar Award finalists, this is a sweet sapphic love story about two Asian-American girls in Los Angeles, one in our world or somewhere very close to it, one in a parallel world where magic works and tech is less well developed. They meet through a rift between the worlds, struggle to manage teenage problems and also prevent the bad guys from destroying both versions of the city. And there’s also lots of food and coffee. Very breezy and cheerful. You can get Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe here.

The Raven Scholar, by Antonia Hodgson

Posted on 26 May 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Today, Bersun was plainly dressed. An iron band for a crown, stamped with an ∞ – sacred symbol of the Eternal Path. His black tunic was slashed with five scarlet claw marks, a reversal of his bodyguards’ uniform. He wore chain mail beneath his tunic, and a longsword at his belt. Orrun was at peace, the rebellion a long-faded scar. But Bersun was a warrior to the bone. Even now, after more than two decades on the throne, he looked more natural dressed as one.

First of the Hugo Best Novel finalists that I acquired and read after the ballot was announced and before the Packet was made available. (These posts are a couple of weeks behind my actual reading at the moment.) Hodgson is apparently already well known as a writer of eighteenth-century crime novels; this is her first fantasy, set in a world (or at least a country) where eight totemic elemental animals (including the titular Raven) dominate human culture, and the new king is determined in a series of Hunger Games-style trials. It’s an intricate and well constructed plot, as leading characters turn out to be completely different to who we thought they were, and indeed the game plan of the bad guys turns out to be completely different to what it looked like. I found the brutal violence a bit ick though. You can get The Raven Scholar here.

The Invisible Parade, by Leigh Bardugo and John Picacio

Posted on 18 May 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second frame of third page:

One of this year’s Hugo finalists for Best Graphic Story, a straightforward short book, perhaps for younger readers, about coming to terms with grief through celebrating the day of the Dead with otherworldly entities. You can get The Invisible Parade here.

2026 Hugos: Best Professional Artist

Posted on 17 May 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

As not very scientifically determined by me.

NB that Lulu Chen’s website has several bogus links.

In previous years I have also posted my votes for Best Fan Artist, but I know too many of the finalists to feel comfortable doing that this year. I will say, however, that I will not give a high preference to the finalist who stated that they got onto the Hugo final ballot out of spite.

2026 Hugos: Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form

Posted on 16 May 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

I had already seen four of the finalists here, and so it did not take lonmg to get through the other two – especially since I gave up on one of them 15 minutes in. Many thanks to the studios for including the shooting scripts for most of the episodes in the Hugo Packet, which is helpful for following the plot, but also for illustrating how much more a dramatic presentation is than just the words.

Two of these six are the climax of a season-line storyline, another is the first in a series and another is the second last (and perhaps winds up the main storyline for that show, the last episode being more of a coda). I have said it before: I do wonder if we would be better served by a Hugo for episodic fiction, and a Hugo for one-shot stories, regardless of length. Only one or two of these finalists actually works well as a standalone piece, and almost everyone who watched and nominated one of them will have watched and appreciated the entire series.

Anyway.

1) The Story and the Engine (Doctor Who) – of course, I must vote for Doctor Who anyway, but this is a very good episode (my second favourite of the season) and also takes the show to a place it had not been before, the largest city of Africa’s largest country, with a spider-god and a cameo from Jo Martin. Good stuff.

2) We is Us (Plur1bus) – a great setup for the season ahead, and probably the best single episode of a generally excellent show. Later episodes built on the premise, but this is very good scene-setting of our imperfect world being turned upside down.

3) All Systems Red (Murderbot) – I was one of the three people in fandom who bounced off the original Murderbot stories, but I really enjoyed the TV series, and the final episode of the main story arc (ninth of the ten) really combined tension, action and humour to take us where we needed to get to.

4) The Perimeter (Murderbot) – This didn’t work as well for me, dancing very close to Murderbot-as-cute-robot, which is a trope I hate. The show-runners were given the choice of two out of three episodes to have on the ballot, and decided to drop the first episode, Free Commerce; I would have preferred it to this one.

And just as a parenthesis, this is only the second time that the Nominee Diversity provision has been applied to a TV series since it was enacted into Section 3.8.6 of the Constitution. Would it really have been so awful to have three episodes of Murderbot on the ballot, which is what voters actually voted for? (Knowing full well that Doctor Who would probably have lost out.)

5) Cold Harbor (Severance) – not having watched a single episode of this show before, and being only vaguely familiar with the premise (the main cast find that they have been psychologically severed between different personalities for their work and non-work lives), I really enjoyed this although I did not understand everything that was going on (having the script to hand helped a bit, but not much). Fantastically well shot and directed; though I did wonder if Adam Scott is capable of wearing more than one expression on his face.

6) The Road to the Spear (Wheel of Time) – I watched the first ten minutes and realised that I did not have a clue what was going on, and was curiously distracted by the utterly wooden acting of Josha Stradowski as protagonist Rand al’Thor. So then I read the script, and I still didn’t understand what was going on. Better uses for an hour of my life than to finish watching it.

As they say, your mileage may vary.

Holy Terrors, by Margaret Owen

Posted on 15 May 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

“Who briefed you?” My own voice sounds distant as a stranger’s.

My first Hugo book since the 2026 ballot was announced, this is one of the finalists in the Lodestar category, and turns out to be the third in a fantasy trilogy. I enjoyed it for the frenemy relationship between the two central characters and the convoluted magical fantasy plot; I felt I did not lose out too much by having missed the first two books. The breathless first-person present-tense narration annoyed me, as did the many mistakes in German in what is explicitly a Bavarian-based world; and I wondered how it comes about that teenagers get given senior law enforcement responsibilities in this particular society. So I suspect it won’t get my top vote in the category, but it was a good start. You can get Holy Terrors here.

2026 Hugos: Best Short Story

Posted on 9 May 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

In case you hadn’t noticed, this year’s Hugo Voter Packet is out, with tremendous efficiency; I had however already located a lot of the finalists online, and wrote up this listing of the stories in advance.

1) My top vote goes to “In My Country”, by Thomas Ha. I thought this was a tremendously creepy depiction of a totalitarian society where thought control and euphemism are heavy and omnipresent. Also on the Nebula ballot.

Third paragraph (no internal sections):

Like all neighborhoods, mine has a blue house.

2) “Missing Helen” by Tia Tashiro was one of my picks for the BSFA Awards, but didn’t make the cut with voters. It is a well imagined story of what happens if your ex gets off with your clone. Second paragraph of third section:

You didn’t know these things about him when he first moved to your city. You’d talked yourself out of the associate’s degree before high school graduation, pragmatism trumping college dreams, and taken an apprenticeship as an electrician with a program specializing in bot tech. You were progressing well, nearing the end of your training. You liked unravelling tricky problems the best, diagnosing a malfunctioning bot like a doctor might a patient.

3) “10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days”, by Samantha Mills, is a very short (2000 words) set of effective vignettes about love in times of apocalypse.Second paragraph of third section:

We adopt a pair of cats. We name them Shaun and Liz.

4) “Wire Mother” by Isabel J. Kim. What do you do if you are a teenager whose mother has been replaced by an AI? Second paragraph of third section:

Rina’s in her late twenties. Before there was Rina, there was Wren, and before Wren, there was Agatha, all of whom were pretty, strawberry-blonde women who Cassie’s father had dismissed before they turned thirty. On the screens, Cassie’s mom is forever twenty-five. Some digital people age in simulacrum. Others stay the same as when they were created, and AMY was made the moment that Cassie’s father had the funds to make himself a wife

5) “Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything” by Effie Seiberg, about a superhero who is also a wheelchair user. I appreciate the message but I found the prose a bit clunky. Second paragraph of thirdsection:

The union leader, a woman named “Big Dig” with hands like gopher claws, went through the agenda. Most of it was assigning press stuff. But eventually we got to the one real thing on the agenda—the union wanted to defeat Doctor Croc, a green scaly menace who’d been razing buildings, most recently a conference center.

6) “Six People to Revise You” by J.R. Dawson. I didn’t really understand this one, and to the extent that I did, I wasn’t sure if it was sf. Second paragraph of third section:

I work at the high school where I graduated.

2026 Hugos: Best Poem

Posted on 2 May 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

I’m still not totally sure about the Best Poem category, but I’m going to kick off my Hugo reviewing for this year by revealing my own votes, as follows.

1) “Landing: Seattle” by Brandon O’Brien, text on this page

Third stanza (long one, sorry):

Mission Control, you told me not to be shocked.
I’m just an envoy among these meetings. A pleasure
just to be invited and all that. And you told me
not to sell myself short, I know I am neither peerless
nor no less a peer as the others here,
but you don’t get it. I… get emotional.
When we gather here, we consensus the stars.
We draft the laws that carve diamonds fine,
we dictate the portent paths, we school
and are thus schooled; in a ten-minute parley
between panels we broker treaties that move
stories through the digit-lines; in a brief passing
twixt moving platforms two colleagues will draft
new craft guidances for new worlds; in a barcon brokerage
tomorrow night two lords will strike delicate business
firm; all weekend we will declare truces—
sparing doubt without relying on fear,
holding sorrow without swelling to hopelessness,
saving our blades for the armies of capital growth
and the rattle of the badly impersonating clanker swarms
and oh God the fascists why are there still fascists
but that’s why we have these meetings in the first place.
I would risk a rank or more
if I could fellowship here forever.
Because are we ever still together
if we can’t break bread or ice or our own bad habits
of not being personable?
Aren’t I allowed to dream of more realms
being let into our commonwealth?

A witty depiction of a space explorer visiting a Worldcon.

2) “Care for Lightning” by Mari Ness

Third-ish stanza:

Bitch got stuff done. Lightning hits
a bit different now. Still pounds
against the clouds, of course. Still kills
when it lands too close. But doesn’t
pierce the way it once did, or leave
half-orphans in its wake. And
those temples. You’ve seen them, right —
still gleaming over broken fields. And
her hands, a sudden gentle touch,
slicing through the sharpest pains.

A riff on Hera.

3) “How to Become a Sea Witch” by Theodora Goss

Third (and final) stanza:

You can spend your days
sitting on the rocks, stirring the tidal pools
as though they were cauldrons,
causing shipwrecks if you want to,
granting wishes, stealing
the voices of mermaids and seabirds
to make yours especially shrill,
screeching like a gull,
or sonorous, like buoy bells
ringing far from shore. You can gather
and store the treasures of the waves—bits of glass
worn smooth, coral and pearls,
gold vessels from Phoenician ships.
How rich you will be!
And how deeply you will dream, sea witch—
as deeply as the dark hidden depths
of the sea.

The other side of the Little Mermaid story.

4) “The World to Come” by Jennifer Hudak

Third stanza:

Jerusalem calling—demanding—
fingers on puppet strings pulling me in
forcing my return to where I’ve never been.

The resurrection of the dead, in Biblical terms.

5) “Hex Supply Customer Support Log” by Elis Montgomery

Third stanza:

Hello! I’m Rune, your aid today.
Have code and date at hand.
I’ll check our logs without delay
so this can go as planned.

Sorry, I just found this a bit silly, about an AI agent dealing with customer service for a magic shop in Common Measure.

6) “The Mourning Robot” by Angela Liu

Third stanza:

bones, hands over our eyes,
aluminum sheets over our hearts.

Didn’t really get what this was about, though I think it is about anthropomorphic robots which I don’t usually like as a theme.

Where to get the 2026 Hugo finalists

Posted on 25 April 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

The Hugo final ballot is out, and I understand that as is usual, the Hugo team is working hard to assemble a Voter Packet which will be made available for free to all Hugo voters (WSFS members of this year’s Worldcon). This is obviously a Good Thing, but as a matter of fact you can start your Hugo reading right now; there is no need to wait until the Packet is available.

Below, I give links to works which are available for free online, and Amazon links to other works, skipping individual people and Dramatic Presentations. The Packet, when it is available, is likely to also include samples of work by individuals who are finalists, and if we’re lucky also a Dramatic Presentation or two. But you can get started right now.

Best Novel

Best Novella

Best Novelette

Best Short Story

Best Series

Best Graphic Story or Comic

Best Related Work

Best Semiprozine

The Deadlands
Escape Pod
khōréō magazine
On Spec: The Canadian Magazine of the Fantastic
Strange Horizons
Uncanny Magazine

Best Fanzine

Best Fancast

Best Poem

Lodestar Award for Best YA Book

Finally, a couple of people have challenged me over linking to Amazon from my various book posts, such as this one. I get no reward at all for writing this blog, apart from £25 in Amazon credits about once a year from people clicking on my affiliate links. If you can point me to an independent bookselling site, preferably in the UK where the largest segment of my readers are based, where I would get similar credits for referred sales, then I’m all ears.

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

Posted on 10 February 2026 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

Posted on 11 November 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

Posted on 3 September 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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

Posted on 26 August 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

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.

From the Heart of Europe

Books, politics, languages and life

Tag Archives: hugo 2026

Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler, by Susana M. Morris

2026 Hugos: Best Novella

Three graphic novels from the Hugo ballot: The Space Cat, Absolute Wonder Woman Vol 1, The Power Fantasy Vol 1

2026 Hugos: Best Novelette

Inventing the Renaissance, by Ada Palmer

Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe, by C.B. Lee

The Raven Scholar, by Antonia Hodgson

The Invisible Parade, by Leigh Bardugo and John Picacio

2026 Hugos: Best Professional Artist

2026 Hugos: Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form

Holy Terrors, by Margaret Owen

2026 Hugos: Best Short Story

2026 Hugos: Best Poem

Where to get the 2026 Hugo finalists

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

Shroud, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh