The 2026 Hugo Awards: My Hugo Ballot

Every year, when Hugo nominations open, I put together a preliminary ballot. I jot down the titles of the things that blew me away in the previous year, and the perennial nominees like Strange Horizons (and more recently, the Ancillary Review of Books). I look over the Hugo Spreadsheet of Doom for titles I might have forgotten or good ideas, and I send that ballot in. Then I put together another list, of books to read, movies to watch, and other things to look into between now and the nominating deadline. With weeks to go, I tell myself every year, I could easily get through all of these potential nominees and compile a diverse and informed ballot.

This is not, to be clear, a plan that ever survives contact with real life, but this year has been a special case. It might explain something about my mental state as I prepare to finalize my 2026 Hugo nominations if I say that in the hours since I sat down to write this post, I was disturbed by an alert warning of Iranian missile launches, and forced to remove to a shelter, no less than six seven eight times. March has not quite been a lost reading month, but it has mostly featured comfort reading, and even that rather slowly. 

And so, with a little over two days left until Hugo voting closes, what you're getting in this post is more or less my preliminary Hugo ballot from a month ago. Not all categories are represented here—I've left out the ones where I don't feel that I have anything interesting to say, or no recommendations to make. But late and incomplete as it is, I hope you'll find this ballot of interest, and perhaps find some recommendations here to add to your own ballot.

Best Novel:

• Dengue Boy by Michel Nieva, translated by Rahul Bery - Every year when I make up my best novel ballot I find myself conflicted between books published by literary publishers that are brilliant, but have no chance of making it onto the ballot, and more realistic choices. Nieva's phantasmagorical romp (which may or may not actually belong on the novella ballot by word count) is definitely in the former category, but it is too undeniably good not to get my vote. Following the titular creature, a human-mosquito hybrid in a climate ravaged future, this is caustic, but also extremely funny, satire of exploitative capitalism. (review)
• Luminous by Silvia Park - While we're on the subject of genre novels published by non-genre publishers, here's an example of a novel that feels as core SF as it is possible to be, and which nevertheless has not received the attention it deserved from SFF fandom (though it did win the Otherwise award just a few days ago). Set in a future, unified Korea in which humanoid robots have become indispensable to the running of human society, and the difference between human and machine grows harder and harder to discern, it is at points thrilling and heartbreaking, with obvious connections to classics of the genre like A.I.: Artificial Intelligence and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. (review)
• There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm - There's a thread of high-concept technothrillers running through the science fiction of the last few years that has been delivering some really fun, exciting novels. I couldn't quite convince people to put Seth Dickinson's Exordia on the ballot last year, so let's see if qntm's self-published-turned-traditionally-published phenomenon will do the trick. Like Exordia, this is a deranged adventure in which agents of a secretive government organization battle beings who are able to manipulate reality itself. This time around, however, the beings are anti-memes, able to erase themselves from their perceivers memories (and sometimes those perceivers as well). This results in a mind-bending narrative in which readers must crane around characters' shoulders to fully comprehend the story they're reading. (review)
• Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky - Of all the genre novels I read in 2025, I most regret not getting around to reviewing Shroud, which increasingly feels like a key work in Tchaikovsky's voluminous bibliography. In a corporate-controlled future where your right to exist out of suspended animation depends on the profits you bring in for the company, a team of surveyors prepare to assess the titular planet, a lightless hellscape awash in radio signals, for exploitation. When an accident strands them on the planet, they must scramble to survive, while slowly realizing that Shroud is far from uninhabited. Combining elements from Alien Clay, Children of Time, and other Tchaikovsky works, Shroud is one of the most effective expressions of the ideas that have occupied him in recent years, as well as a thrilling tale of survival and moral awakening. 
• The Incandescent by Emily Tesh - Tesh's Hugo-winning novel Some Desperate Glory set the bar for her future novels absurdly high, and yet within little more than a year of its publication, she returned with a concept that felt both obvious and completely original—a magical school story, told from the perspective of the teacher. Overworked, overqualified deputy head Saffy Walden is brilliant, compassionate, and a little full of herself, and she gives us a perspective on growing up magical that reminds us how good it can feel to put childhood behind and stretch your wings—and how hard that sometimes is. Along the way, Tesh pokes furiously at the class issues that underpin both Dark Academia, and the UK's private school system. (review)

I would have also loved some extra nomination slots for Circular Motion by Alex Foster (review), Meet Me at the Crossroads by Megan Giddings (review) and The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien (review). Books that I would have liked to get to before the nomination deadline include Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders, A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett, The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes, Notes From a Regicide by Isaac Fellman, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones, Transmentation | Transience by Darkly Lem, and When There Are Wolves Again by E.J. Swift.

Best Novella:

As I've mentioned several times this year—on my BlueSky account, and in a letter of comment to a recent Octothorpe, in particular—I think it's high time that Hugo nominators made an effort to break Tor's stranglehold on the best novella category. Tor puts out great books, but it is not healthy for the award, or the field, for only one publisher to be represented in this category year after year. All of my nominations this year are, therefore, non-Tor books, and I encourage you to consider giving your vote to at least some novellas from other publishers.

• The Iron Below Remembers by Sharang Biswas (Neon Hemlock) - In this raucous superhero romantasy, a history professor is recruited by his superpowered boyfriend to study an artifact which may be an ancient mechanical warrior. The true joy of this story, however, is the dizzying breadth and complexity of the history its narrator reveals, and in the challenges his relationship faces. (review)
• No Such Thing as Duty by Lara Elena Donnelly (Neon Hemlock) - Near the end of his life, William Somerset Maugham travel to Romania as a spy. His target is a mysterious aristocrat who soon fascinates the ailing author, and tempts him with the promise of eternal life. Darkly romantic and deeply sad, this story twists the vampire's temptation into a conflict between duty to others, and the things one owes oneself.
• Into the Sun by C.F. Ramuz, translated by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan (New Directions Publishing) - Originally published in 1922, this novella might be the first climate change story. As the planet begins orbiting closer and closer to the sun, the inhabitants of a small Swiss village observe, dismiss, and try to survive the changes in their environment. Their reactions are heartbreakingly familiar, giving this novel a force its author could never have imagined.
• Aerth by Deobrah Tomkins (Weatherglass Books) - On a world that is just like our own but also entirely different, a young man grows up dreaming of adventure. When he becomes an astronaut, he travels to Earth, which fascinates and repels him with its corruption, obsession with money, and rampant environmental destruction. This riff on Stranger in a Strange Land is a darker version of that tale, which finally asks what costs there are to leaving home, and whether it is possible to fully return. (review)
• The Creator by Aliya Whiteley (NewCon Press) - A perfectly turned bit of horror, this novella reads like a classic Twilight Zone episode. Narrated by a man who arrives in his family home after an unspecified disaster and tries to unravel what has happened to his family, it expertly weaves together his reminiscences and his family's own experiences, finally revealing a shocking but undeniable truth.

If I had an extra slot, I would also nominate The Supersonic Phallus by Steven Key Meyers, a delightful X-Files-style romp that is also a wistful queer love story.

Best Graphic Story:

Is it just me, or does it feel as if the Hugo voting fandom has started losing interest in this category? Every year, it seems, there are fewer titles being passed around and praised within the community, and less excitement about what actually gets nominated. Still, maybe it is just me—my comics reading has dropped off a lot in recent years, and I only have one recommendation to offer in this category. (Two if you include the latest volume of Saga, but although I enjoyed reading it, I don't think Saga needs to be nominated every year.)

• The Power Fantasy, Volume 1 by Kieron Gillen and Caspar Wijngaard (Image Comics) - Thirty years ago, Watchmen asked "what if superheroes were dumb and kind of fashy", and then posited a pretty messed up world emerging from that premise. Gillen and Wijngaard's engrossing new comic asks "what if superheroes were really smart and highly aware of all the ways their existence could endanger the planet" and then reveals that the resulting society is no less warped and fucked up. It's a smart, entertaining ride that deserves all the plaudits it's been getting.

Comics that sounded interesting but which I wasn't able to get to include: Drome by Jesse Lonergan, Tongues by Anders Nilsen, and Hello Sunshine by Keezy Young.

Best Series:

I've got a bit of a problem with this category this year. The series I'd most love to nominate, Adrian Tchaikovsky's The Tyrant Philosophers, is ineligible due to having been nominated last year (not to worry; there is already a 2026 entry that will make nominating it in next year's Hugos possible). My suggestion from last year that Nghi Vo's Singing Hills Cycle be nominated in this category rather than best novella seemed pretty popular, but then the nomination was disqualified due to insufficient word count. I don't believe the novella published in 2025 crosses the 240,000 word threshold. Which leaves me with only one nomination this year, though it's one that I do expect to see on the ballot.

• The Cemeteries of Amalo by Katherine Addison (qualifying work: The Tomb of Dragons) - I don't think anyone could have predicted, when Addison took the SFF world by storm in 2014 with The Goblin Emperor, that it would end up becoming a detective series about a gentle, broken necromancer who solves murders while also finding lost pets and resolving family disputes. With the conclusion of the series in 2025, we can now see it as the major work of fantasy that it is, one that blends elements of the detective genre into this alternate world with absolute harmony.

Best Related Work:

• Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction by Paul Kincaid - Briardene Books—who, in all fairness, are my publisher—have not missed yet. Their third book is yet another argument for the necessity of science fiction and fantasy criticism, but this time around, the approach taken by Paul Kincaid is to examine the stories that the genre tells about itself. How do we define science fiction, what does that definition leave out, and what story are we telling through it? The excellent essays in this book will leave anyone who is serious about the genre with much food for thought.
• "The Cuddled Little Vice" by Elizabeth Sandifer - It seems as if these days we are always being challenged to react to the news that someone whose art we loved is also a horrible person. The horrific revelations about Neil Gaiman saw many in the fandom retreating to the stock responses one sees in such situations: I never liked his work anyway; actually, if you read this, you can see he was admitting it all along. Elizabeth Sandifer thus offers a vital service, when she examines Gaiman's career and life seriously and unsparingly. This book-length essay is at once a serious engagement with Gaiman as an artist, and a dissection of how he hid his crimes in plain sight. (review)

Best Game or Interactive Work:

If there's one certainty in this year's Hugo nominations, it's that Dogubomb's Blue Prince, a roguelike puzzle game that is at once fascinating and frustrating, will be on the ballot in this category. I enjoyed Blue Prince, but I also had enough reservations about it that I'm content to let other people make it a Hugo nominee. Which leaves me with only one game to nominate, but it's a doozy.

• Type Help - We seem to have settled on "database games" for the lineage of games that runs from Return of the Obra Dinn, Her Story, and onwards, in which players must solve logic puzzles from a set of available information to solve a mystery. Developer William Rous's free-to-play game offers a startlingly effective twist on this format. More importantly, however, it uses its deceptively simple mechanic to tell a genuinely terrifying story with a mind-bending SFnal McGuffin, something that one could easily imagine forming the backbone of an excellent Doctor Who episode. Few games in 2025 excited me as much as Type Help. (review)

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form:

• 28 Years Later (dir. Danny Boyle) - I think it speaks to how good this film is that I was able to enjoy it without having watched either of the previous movies in the series, and while not being a huge fan of the zombie genre. But 28 Years Later is a genuinely smart, moving meditation on how society reforms itself after catastrophe, and what it teaches its children in that catastrophe's wake.
• Companion (dir. Drew Hancock) - The sexbot genre has been a pretty fertile one in recent years, but I think Companion is one of the best expressions of the concept. It allows us to learn, along with its heroine, what she is, and what she is capable of, and asks serious questions about what a "real" relationship is, and whether a bad boyfriend really needs the excuse of his girlfriend being a machine to act that way.
• Predator: Badlands (dir. Dan Trachtenberg) - Continuing to revitalize the Predator franchise (while dragging the Alien franchise along kicking and screaming) this installment sees a junior predator team up with an out-of-commission synth for some enjoyable odd couple antics, and some genuinely well done monster encounters. It's a reminder that the paucity of our franchise-extruded landscape is a choice, not an inevitability, and that in the hands of creative, playful people, even the most shopworn concepts can find new life.
• Sinners (dir. Ryan Coogler) - It didn't win the Oscar; will it win the Hugo? I mean, almost certainly, because on top of being a stunning cinematic achievement, a fascinating portrait of its place and moment, and—entirely unexpectedly—a great musical, Sinners is a top-notch addition to the already groaning vampire canon. It's hard to argue that any other movie deserves to be crowned as last year's best achievement in genre filmmaking.
• Weapons (dir. Zach Cregger) - "What if Magnolia was a Stephen King-style horror movie?" is not a question that I think anyone thought needed answering, but happily Zach Cregger decided to give it a shot. The result is weird, moving, funny, and along the way manages to prod at an American status quo which purports to protect children, and instead leaves them to fight off monsters on their own.

I also really dithered over The Long Walk (and maybe also Life of Chuck; 2025 was a surprisingly good year for Stephen King adaptations). Exit 8 is a well-crafted horror movie and very good adaptation of a creepy game. And Dust Bunny, though a bit of a mess, probably deserves a nomination just for being so different (though I'm not entirely sure whether it's a 2025 or 2026 release).

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form:

• Andor, "Make It Stop" - The second season of Andor offered fewer standout episodes than the first, but I was still deeply impressed by this entry, which offers a backstory for spymaster Luthen Rael and his relationship with his assistant Kleya Marki, and includes some of the season's most tense and affecting action sequences.
• Black Mirror, "Common People" - After his wife suffers a debilitating stroke, a grief-stricken husband is offered the chance to store her consciousness on a server, returning her to full function. Very soon, however, hidden fees, terms of service changes, and new service tiers begin eating away at the couple's finances and wellbeing. It's not a subtle story, but the performances, by Rashida Jones and Chris O'Dowd, give haunting life to the story, which deploys Black Mirror's cynicism and technophobia to its best effect.
• Black Mirror, "Eulogy" - An embittered loner (Paul Giamatti) is asked to contribute memories to an interactive eulogy of his former lover. He ends up on a melancholy trip down memory lane, recalling their relationship and the mistakes he made that he can now never take back. Giamatti anchors the story, of course, but the imaginative, disorienting imagery with which the episode realizes the memory retrieval process turn it into top-notch science fiction.
• Paradise, "The Day" - There was much talk late last year about the Kathryn Bigelow movie A House of Dynamite and its terrifying depiction of America on the brink of nuclear war. Months before that movie was released, however, Hulu's rather silly post-apocalypse show Paradise delivered something much more effective at half the running time and a fraction of the budget. As a global disaster builds, we watch as people in power realize that they are no longer in control, and as normality disappears forever. The result is one of the most terrifying hours of TV I watched last year.
• Severance, "Chikhai Bardo" - I have issues with the streaming TV convention of an off-format flashback episode that explains all the show's backstory. It's a crutch that often feels more profound than it actually is because it answers questions in an oblique way that makes the audience work for them, and feel smarter when they get to where the episode was taking them. That being said, this device is popular because it works, and "Chikhai Bardo", which brings Gemma, the missing wife of protagonist Mark, to life while explaining what has happened to her, is an absolutely top-notch example of its type.

Honorable mention: Wheel of Time's "The Road to the Spear", which is basically "Chikhai Bardo" but with epic fantasy. As I said, I have issues with this device, so I didn't want to nominate two examples of it. But choosing between these two episodes was not easy, and I'm not entirely certain that "The Road to the Spear" didn't deserve it more.

Best Fancast:

• A Meal of Thorns - Ancillary Review of Books's biweekly book club went from strength to strength in 2025, discussing a wide range of genre works in depth, and with an eye to how they reflect the field around them. It has quickly become one of my essential listens.
• Critical Friends - The Strange Horizons reviews department podcast stepped up its production schedule last year to produce a steady stream of conversations about genre writing and criticism. Each episode picks up from a review published in the magazine, and invites a range of critics to discuss the ideas raised in it.
• Octothorpe - The premier source for discussion of the ins and outs of science fiction fandom and its institutions is back in Hugo contention, having recused itself last year after winning in 2024. And since their work continues to be top notch and informative, I am going to go right back to nominating them for Hugos.
• Shelved by Genre - I held off on nominating the Ranged Touch shows in this category in previous years, because I believed that they ran afoul of its "fan" definition. I've now been led to believe that the matter isn't as clear-cut as I thought, and since Shelved by Genre had such a stellar 2025—with informative, illuminating discussions of William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy and selected works by Alan Moore, among others—I think I'm going to let the hardworking nomination validators work out the validity of this choice, and just give them my vote.

Best Fan Writer:

• Dan Hartland - Somehow, between editing the Strange Horizons reviews department and hosting Critical Friends, Dan Hartland still has time to write Snap! Criticism, an utterly unique column for Ancillary Review of Books in which he pairs a recent work of SFF with a recent work of SFF criticism. It's a brilliant way of stressing the vital role of criticism to the field, and of examining interesting books through an unusual lens.
• Roseanna Pendlebury - Also an ARB columnist, Roseanna has been doing the lord's work with her Small Press Dispatch, in which she highlights small press SFF novellas. She has also been writing up her reading of The Lord of the Rings on her personal blog, where in 2025 she covered Fellowship of the Ring.

Astounding Award for Best New Writer:

• Antonia Hodgson - The Raven Scholar, Hodgson's debut fantasy novel, is an utterly delightful romp in which a contest to inherit an imperial throne is crossed with a murder mystery, as related by a flock of snooty ravens. It's a novel that reminded me how much fun epic fantasy can be, and its only flaw is that it is the first volume in a series. (First year of eligibility)
• Jared Pechaček - I listed Pechaček's indescribable debut novel, The West Passage, in my list of the best reads of 2025, so it should probably come as no surprise that I'm nominating him for the Astounding award. With Gormenghast and Studio Ghibli in its DNA, The West Passage is a stunning, indescribable, often quite funny fantasy adventure, in which two young people set out to set right a world ruled by monstrous Ladies, and end up changing it entirely. (Second year of eligibility)
• Silvia Park - It should come as no surprise that a debut author whose novel is on my Hugo ballot has also ended up on my Astounding ballot. I won't repeat my praise for Luminous here, but I will say that it's astonishing that a work this assured and complex is its author's debut. (First year of eligibility)
• Sylvie Cathrall - Set in a society of academics who live on a water planet and study its oceans, Cathrall's Sunken Archive duology—whose second volume, A Letter From the Lonesome Shore, was published last year (review)—is equal parts charming and intriguing. Told through letters and journal entries, it is a series that celebrates both the pursuit of knowledge, and the acceptance of those whose perspective is different than our own. It's one of my favorite reads of the last few years. (Second year of eligibility)

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