Tag Archives: hugo 2026

2026 Hugos: Best Short Story

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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 What do you do if you are a teenager whose mother has been replaced by an AI?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

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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

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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

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

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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.