2026 Hugo Awards | Hacker News Reader

2026 Hugo Awards

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Allow me to make a small recommendation for the "best related work": Ada Palmer's 'Inventing the Renaissance.'

It's a fantastic work of complex history, told with the tools of science fiction and fantasy writing. But it remains a high quality academic work: the tools are used to unravel the telling of a gay and complicated topic, but you still get the vastness.

If you like ACOUP, it should be right up your alley.

I was really put off by the Terra Ignota series. I struggled through it, but her writing really didn't gel with me. I've been resisting reading "Inventing the renaissance" because of that, though it does come highly recommended.

I found it very USian [0] - obsessed with religion (and the overt assumption that emperors are a good thing was unsettling). And I also found her position that all the best of human thought lay in the past (the greek classics and the renaissance specifically in this case) deeply at odds with my worldview.

[0] I have noticed that US writers tend to feature religion prominently in their writing (e.g. Brandon Sanderson, not that this stops me from enjoying his writing, which I do). I read a new writer and make a bet whether they're USian after a couple of chapters based on their attitude to religion, and I've been mostly right.

A couple thoughts here...

Palmer's handling of the different groups in Terra Ignota takes both sides, in every case. The case for why people join the imperial group has to be made, and made honestly. But problems with that approach are also pretty clear, and well explored: at the very least, elites get weird if they aren't responsive to the people, and the elites in Terra Ignota get very, very weird. I think she takes a bit more time setting up the positive case for the imperials exactly because it's pretty alien to us. Or, at least it was before our current global swing towards authoritarianism.

Europeans were also once pretty obsessed with religion, as you might recall. They may be less so now, but who's to say the pendulum won't swing? This is one of the things I loved about the series -- the future or build is very different because the pendulum has swung in ways that aren't obvious to us, from our modern perspective. Just as the people of Florence would find some of our obsessions pretty strange and unexpected.

good thoughts. Thanks for sharing :)

When did people start thinking it was ok to assume that the viewpoints of characters in a work of fantasy are what the author actually believes? Why is this so common in modern literature criticism? what is going on?

> and the overt assumption that emperors are a good thing was unsettling

God forbid a piece of literature explores a concept you find unsettling.

Fair points. But it wasn't so much the viewpoint of any individual character as the assumptions underlying the entire cast.

But you're right - I should read her other works precisely because this one unsettled me

I’m not sure why you seem so interested in vetting the beliefs of the author of a fantasy series. Just engage with the text.

It's not so much vetting their thoughts, as dealing with my own inner voice ranting at the beliefs I see in their writing.

There's a few other books that I've been unable to finish purely because I disagree with the author so much that I just can't read their work. I end up shouting at them (sometimes actually shouting at the book) so much that that forms my engagement with the text and it becomes pointless trying to read any more. At least I managed to finish Terra Ignota.

The one that caught me off guard was Old Man's War by John Scalzi as best series.

> The Hugo Award for Best Series is one of the Hugo Awards given each year for science fiction or fantasy stories published in or translated into English during the previous calendar year. The award is available for series of science fiction or fantasy stories consisting of at least 3 published works totaling at least 240,000 words, with at least one work released or translated into English during the previous calendar year. A losing finalist becomes eligible again with the publication of at least two new works totaling at least 240,000 words.

And now, checking on it... The Shattering Peace was released in September of 2025.

I guess I've got another item for my reading list (currently going through the classics of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser... I wonder if that will ever be eligible for a retro Hugo Award for series).

Color me surprised. The first book was the only one I got through. Scalzi's characterizations in that one are singular, in that all of his characters think and talk like exactly the same snark-spewing geeky dude. Even the very few women.

I should look into the sequel, I'd be happy for him if he stretched himself after the first one.

The first one was very much written in an homage to Starship Troopers and it was an early work of his. His very first one was Agent to the Stars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_to_the_Stars#Publication... - available online at https://scalzi.com/agent/ ) which was a book that he didn't want to write in that he wanted to make sure he could write as a career before writing the book he'd been thinking about for a long time... it's ok, maybe better than ok, but not great. He didn't want to find out that he didn't have the stuff to be a professional writer with the book that he really wanted to write.

That book that he really wanted to write was Old Man's War. I would put it as a good one, but not a great one. A young man inspired by Heinlein and Haldeman writing military science fiction as his first real book.

His later books get better as he became a more mature writer writing new ideas rather than the story he had in the back of his mind for the past decade. The Ghost Brigades (I believe) is better than the previous (it deals with the special forces). The Human Division and The End of All Things were written as serialized chapters that kind of stand on their own and I believe that format worked quite well with him.

I will note that... he likes snark. I don't recall much in his later Old Man's War books... I think he got it out in The Interdependency (a fun series but you have to be ok with snark and casual vulgarity - the Audible is read by Wil Wheaton (some may be turned off by that alone) who is able to read and handle the snark and casual vulgarity quite well). I will recommend it if one is ok with a very snarky character - it's a political intrigue series.

  ..the Audible is read by Wil Wheaton (some may be turned off by that alone)

Include me on that list. Man has no range, and a terrible falsetto he uses for women. He managed to get short-listed for the geeky novels I usually enjoy, and for a time, it seemed like I had a 1/3 chance of getting a Wheaton narration.

https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Collapsing-Empire-Audiobook/B...

https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Consuming-Fire-Audiobook/B07H...

https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Last-Emperox-Audiobook/B084RP...

While I recognize it in other of his audio books... there are a few examples of women in the previews. I don't recall him using a falsetto in those books at all.

No, he doesn't have a lot of range... but I don't feel that's necessarily a show stopper for audible books in that I've more than occasionally experienced a reader who did have a lot of range... that sometimes went past the range of the speaker. He reads like an actor where everything it goes from a stage whisper to a slightly increased volume with a drop in pitch... and that often works (for me) compared to readers who its telling Alexa "pause, louder, back 1 minute" to get things that are read in a more hushed whisper.

I'm surprised you're willing to look into the sequel. After reading Old Man's War I've been unwilling to read any more of John Scalzi's work in the decade+ since then. It read like a teenage boy's wish-fulfillment fantasy, and since I've never been a part of that demographic, it was extremely frustrating to get through that book. With my youthful energy at the time, I slogged through to the end of the book somehow.

Have you ever read "Travel by Wire!"? It was the first story that Arthur C. Clarke published. It's... youthful in its writing.

Or how about Pebble in the Sky?

> Boucher and McComas were disappointed by the novel, saying that despite Asimov's good ideas, "his heavy treatment and routine plot are disappointing.

Try to find a copy of The Big U by Neal Stephenson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_U ("When Stephenson's Snow Crash was published in 1992, the book that became a best-seller and vaulted him to fame, The Big U was out of print and Stephenson was content to leave it that way. When original editions began selling on eBay for hundreds of dollars, he relented and allowed The Big U to be republished, saying that the only thing worse than people reading the book was paying that much to read it.")

Or Sundiver being a much weaker book than the rest of the Uplift series.

Or A Planet Called Treason by Orson Scott Card (which was even worse when I reread it as an adult).

Old Man's War was Scalzi's first "real" story... one that he had in the back of his mind to write in his college years.

He has matured as a writer since then.

Holy crap, I haven't thought of Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser in well north of 50 years... thanks for the nostalgiagasm.

On YouTube, I stumbled across the channel "Daddy rolled a 1" which does long form (often an hour long and sometimes closing in on two hours long) deep dives into the early D&D "why was it done that way?"

I forget which one it was that reminded me first of it... Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser was brought up recently in "Was Early D&D Really as Dark as We Remember?" pointing out that while the world was grim, people in Lankhmar were often enjoying life and it wasn't and the grimdark of some modern fantasy.

From the intro to the Audible version of The Swords of Lankhmar (and the text version of Return to Lankhmar)

https://www.blackgate.com/2013/06/24/art-of-the-genre-lookin...

While it doesn't have the full essay in there, it continues with that Lankmar is a place you can return to. (I think https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Swords-of-Lankhmar-Audiobook/... will link into that essay with the preview in the opening credits).

The Audible version is my evening wind down listening.

Where do you find reasonably priced copies of those Fritz Lieber works? My library only has stuff that fits into short story collections and omnibuses. I fondly remember reading a couple of these obtained from Half Price Books way back when and never getting to the end of series due to demise of local used book stores.

Old books... are a "find a copy in used book stores." They're fairly out of print now. The problem being "reasonably priced". If you're driving through the midwest, divert to Forsyth, IL and stop at the Old Book Barn.

I've also converted a lot of my book archive to ebooks. Sometimes I've been disappointed that the old books aren't ebook... but Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are all on Kindle and for better or worse... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09C23YVND?binding=kindle_edition

Otherwise, it's https://www.abebooks.com/author/b000apw3ua/fritz-leiber?ref_... because good used book stores with a appreciable science fiction collection are few and far between. I bought a lot of books at Book Buyers on Castro in Mountain View back in the day. There are some that are in the lower price bands.

Also, his works prior to 1978 are starting to fall out of copyright. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/25421 - for example, The Green Millennium was published in 1954 and fell into the 28+28 and so that became public domain in 2010. The first six of the "Swords" series were published between 1970 and 1977... and should be entering public domain... this year?

Taking about scifi, if you guys haven't watched the tv show SILO yet, I'd highly recommend it. Everyone I've recommended it to so far has been thoroughly impressed.

One of the best adaptations of a series to TV, up there with The Expanse and the like. I read the books after season 1, and still enjoy the show very much. They've taken some adaptation liberties, but they're fully supported by Hugh Howey and they make a lot of sense.

The Expanse was my favorite tv show! However with the latest season finale of season 3 of SILO, it may have become my favorite now.

Any other tv show recommendations? We seem to have similar taste.

Severance

Severance S2 was a clusterfuck tho. Absolute nonsense.

Clair Obscur is going to be game of the year every year for the next decade.

Which is too bad, because Blue Prince is the better game. :)

I'm playing through Clair Obscur now. It's above average for aaa stuff. But there are way too many cut scenes, and dodge/parry mechanics continue to be tedious. And the story is fine, but isn't really grabbing me. Sigh.

Blue Prince, on the other hand, is quite probably the best puzzle game I have ever played. My partner and I worked on it for months, and have a 50+ page Google doc of notes.

> worked on it for months, and have a 50+ page Google doc of notes.

That sounds more like a part time job than a game. I'm curious if you play it for the mental challenge? I feel challenged enough at $dayjob that all I want from games is mindless relaxation.

To be sure, it was a couple few hours here and there, not at the scale of a job.

Blue Prince is an example of what fills are calling 'notebook games' -- instead of giving you lots of qol stuff, you just use a notebook to keep notes. The act of writing and arranging your notes is actually quite immersive. It's also fun!

Blue Prince has layers of puzzles and story... It's pretty reasonable to play to the credits, and not get into the depths of the post credits game; it's a very reasonable cutoff point for non-sickos.

That's the beauty of Blue Prince. The core game doesn't require all of that. You can get to a satisfying ending with moderate puzzle solving. But after finishing the game, there are still hundreds of hours worth of optional puzzles left.

Yeah blue prince is three games (I've played two of them and won't play the third).

First, it's a really compelling roguelite puzzler where you explore and understand the house and it's mechanics. The puzzles are mostly small and straightforward (but not easy!). You can probably win this without taking notes. I found this part compelling and delightful.

Then it's something else where you learn about the world. The puzzles are more complicated and need notebooks and notes to keep the loose threads tracked. This part for me became a slog by the end and I finished mostly to say that I had.

Then its a third thing for sickos.

I am "only" a dozen+ hours into Clair Obscur, and I am similarly not understanding the hype. Combat is too gimmicky and annoying. The story is tonally all over the place. It starts out very dark, and then the characters seemingly have no problems going on stupid side quests because they want to see some cute elves or something. Are you saving the world or not?

The joke side quests work in your standard RPG because they take themselves less seriously. Your character is wielding an eight foot sword, the mage companion is a talking cat, and your boots are haunted by a long-dead Egyptian prince. Sure, go nuts if you want to play the mini-game at the circus belly-dancing competition to win the golden hat.

Clair Obscur starts in such a bleak, breathing world that the characters not treating the situation deadly serious breaks my connection to the world, so I start to focus more on the mechanical annoyances.

I liked Clair Obscur a lot, but I doubt very much if I will ever replay it. The necessity of being able to dodge to survive encounters really killed the fun of the gameplay for me.

Clair Obscur has great art (including music) but isn't a greater game underneath it. It's good but not exceptional. I can see the appeal for final fantasy fans, but I was underwhelmed.

Someone else mentions Blue Prince here. I think that's a much better game relatively speaking, even if not having Clair Obscur's exceptional art.

I'll eat my hat if we still talk about Clair Obscur in the next decade, like we might still be talking about Dark Souls (2011), for example, to this day.

It is a good game in an era where big name studios only care to invest in live-service games, and even indies are starting to rehash the same tropes over and over. It is not a ground-breaking cornerstone of the arts, just an isle of respite among the greed; any food tastes good when you're starving.

Clair Obscur was a far, far more memorable game for me and it's not even close. One actually has a story and characters to care about. The other is a masochism simulation.

You liked it more, that’s fine, but the other literally spawned a new genre (soulslikes)

Also masochism simulator is what people that have only heard about the game from social media call it.

Sinners was a scifi movie...? About vampires in the past...?! Wild. Ditto for Claire Oscura: Expedition 33, which I thought was high fantasy / steampunk at most.

*EDIT:* It appears I'm just being silly, and the Hugos include fantasy. Ironically, the biggest fantasy series of our time by far has won 3 times in Novella form and once in TV form, but never the novels!

The difference between science fiction and fantasy was always only a tenuous distinction imposed by the few nerds who cared a little too much.

As we age out of being culturally relevant, and newer (likely less literate) generations take over the definitions will change, and perhaps should.

To me only hard science fiction will ever count, but I recognize that I'm in the minority there and also don't want to scare away the three remaining readers through gatekeeping.

Fantasys felt so lazy to me. Although sometimes I do enjoy the descriptions. But there is always an escape hatch out of a trouble and one that was not foreshadowed. It is constraints that makes things interesting and especially the higher order consequences of constraints and new tech.

Agreed. Fiction where the solution was "and then he found out he was the chosen one so magic happened" are unsatisfying.

What you described does not qualify as a good fantasy either. There needs to be rules even in the world of magic, and eventually so called hard fiction and fantasy only really differ in the way how they present the fantasies.

There is a book I love: Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny, in which he first wrote about fantasy figures with magic powers in Buddhism tales, and then revealed that they were just humans with high tech and play gods to those who don't.

Thanks for the recommendation . Sounds like a good read.

You're not the only one to be taken aback by that. Yes, the Hugos do fantasy, but I'm not sure I would have even thought to categorize Sinners as fantasy.

I mean, yes, it has vampires. Was From Dusk till Dawn fantasy?

But as a sister comment suggests, categorization is never easy, and probably just reinforced personal biases. (See Old Town Road being reminded from Billboard's country music list.)

I think by definition any vampire story is a fantasy story yes. Since vampires are not real and thus a fantasy creature.

I'd say that line can be blurred somewhat by "Blindsight". "Not real" isn't where I'd put the line, it's "not plausibly and consistently explained (or at least explained away) within the laws of nature.

There's more to Fantasy than a single boolean "does it contain something that is not real?"

Fantasy gets applied to the work as a whole, to its dominant tone and structure, not to one element. A work of fantasy usually has other elements that show it to be such. Is there world-building? Is it a quest or a hero story? Is there some kind of lore that grounds the whole universe? Not all of those are necessary, but usually you can clearly define the whole work holistically as Fantasy.

From Dusk till Dawn in particular is a straight crime thriller that turns into a horror movie.

Ok, I got nerd-sniped into trying to define Fantasy after saying I wouldn't.

I don't think crime thriller or horror have anything to do with if a story is fantasy. Alien is a sci fi movie and a horror movie. Psycho is a horror movie with no fantasy elements. Sinners is a fantasy horror movie. It sounds like you are talking about epic or high fantasy, but there is fantasy romance, fantasy detective, fantasy crime thriller etc. You can even have a fantasy sci fi movie like Star Wars.

>You can even have a fantasy sci fi movie like Star Wars.

And Star Trek.

I will die on the hill that Star Trek is just as much space fantasy as Star Wars.

I can envision a reasonable case that Star Trek is space fantasy, sure. But I think it's significantly overstating things to say that Trek is just as much space fantasy as Star Wars. There's nothing in Star Trek remotely as fantastical as the Force and the users thereof.

>There's nothing in Star Trek remotely as fantastical as the Force and the users thereof.

A lot of things in Trek are a lot more fantastic than the Force. The second episode of the original series has someone whose powers far exceed any Jedi not named Skywalker or Palpatine. Plenty of aliens are telepaths. And then the Q came along. The Douwd are apparently an alien race made of eldritch music that can erase entire species with their mind.

Honestly the Force is far more grounded in comparison. At least it has a structure and some rules. In Star Trek you could find an alien species that literally plays billiards with planets and it's never explained or referenced again. That just a thing that sometimes happens. Oh yeah and Wesley Crusher ascended to a higher plane of existence.

But let's move on to cosmology. A weird barrier at the center of the galaxy where a space god is imprisoned like some JRPG final boss. Anomalies in space that create time loops or fulfill your deepest desires. Whatever subspace is supposed to be - both a "layer under normal space" that's used for communication and also arbitrarily fixes the plot and also sometimes monsters come out of it that steal your organs.

Or technology. Set "Threshold" aside. The transporter can create evil clones of you or turn you into a child. The holodeck can create sentient life on command. The Enterprise got knocked up and had a baby one time. How does the universal translator work? Look up the only canonical explanation in TOS, it's basically magic.

Vampires aren't any more fantastical than FTL travel, and yet we're perfectly happy to have that in SF.

I agree the line between fantasy and sci Fi is very thin. In general I would say if the author intends for it to be a natural explanation like wormholes or something it's sci fi, if it's a magic teleportation spell it is fantasy. There is a series I read once Starships Mage which plays with this, it's hard sci fi for most things but magic exists and FTL is solved through teleportation. Everything non magic has to obey relativity and such.

I'm comfortable considering horror as a subgenre of fantasy. Vampires and folklore and magic are staples of fantasy after all.

Snakes on a plane fantasy?

I'm comfortable considering horror a subgenre of fantasy when it incorporates explicitly supernatural elements.

Culture is fluid, it must be to continue. Categories like this will evolve, expand, and shrink over time.

What is the biggest fantasy series of our time?

A Song of Ice and Fire (contemporary writing I assume), it lost to Harry Potter book against one of GRRM’s best books/chance for win in novel category one year and Spin in another year(Accelerando was another nominee that year)

Surely on cultural impact Harry Potter has to win. While GoT had a decade flash in the pan, Harry Potter is still deeply in the cultural zeitgeist. "Muggles", "You're a Hufflepuff", etc have become cemented into our vocabulary.

GoT is undoubtedly more complex, interesting world, but it never had a generation of children reading the midnight book release. That the author actually penned the series finale is also worth something.

The Hugo voting is kind of skewed since it’s a membership thing where anyone can join but one has to be aware of it and care enough to join.

That's what I was thinking! I was sure my parent meant GoT.

But there can't be many metrics at all where GoT beats out HP for the title of "biggest fantasy series of our time".

The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin

That one is great.

I wanted to like it so much, and the first book was so promising... but couldn't really enjoy the other two books. I understand why it's loved, but also can't see it being the greatest of our time, by a mile

Just listened to The River Has Roots - very short and good adaptation IMHO, it has a bit of singing integral to plot and that is one thing I have trouble translating to the sounds in my head when reading paper books so it’s a big plus for me.

This is such a crappy article - why didn't it include any images of the book covers, etc.? It seems that writing and journalism have become so bad.

these look like the books you see on goodreads choice awards

for some reason, i find that very off putting

Sinners was very cool but I'm surprised to find it as Hugo winner.

With the exception of that really cool scene in the middle, I found Sinners boring and forgettable.

Disappointed to see I already read the Hugo winner for best novel - The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow.

It is a worthy winner in my opinion. Fantasy with a sci-fi element along with a story which takes some untangling. Five stars from me :-)

Drive-by recommendation, not having read The Everlasting yet: The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez.

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