The 2026 Hugo Awards: The Best Novel Shortlist

In a little more than a day, the winners of this year's Hugo awards will be announced in Los Angeles. I've toned down my discussion of the Hugo nominees in recent years—not coincidentally, a period in which the award, especially in the Best Novel category, has become more inward-looking and fun-seeking. Compare, for example, this year's Hugo shortlist with the one for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, which includes climate fiction (a subgenre whose existence the Hugo seems determined to ignore) and near-future political dystopia. So it was a bit to my surprise when I found myself with things to say about each of this year's Best Novel nominees. This is not a great shortlist, but it is, I think, a representative snapshot of a certain subset of the fantastic genres, and as such is worth talking about.

First up on the ballot is Robert Jackson Bennett's A Drop of Corruption, the sequel to 2024's The Tainted Cup, which won the Best Novel award last year. Both books—as well as their sequel, A Trade of Blood—focus on the Holmes and Watson duo Ana and Din, who traipse across the holdings of a technocratic, militaristic fantasy-world empire, investigating murders that are mysterious but also politically sticky. I read A Drop of Corruption and A Trade of Blood in quick succession (look for my review of the latter on the Locus website in the near future), and as a result the three books run together a bit in my head. But this, I think, is not a terrible way of judging them. I was a bit miffed when I saw that a sequel to a Hugo-winning novel had garnered a nomination—that's surely what the Best Series category is for—but one of the things that is remarkable about this series is how consistent its quality is. Across three novels (with, apparently, more to come), it delivers elaborate and fascinating worldbuilding, complex plots, and a host of compelling characters. As a fusion of the detective novel and the fantasy novel, you really couldn't ask for better.

There are two criticisms that tend to come up when the Ana and Din novels are discussed. The first is that the mysteries are rather easy and guessable. This is particularly true in A Trade of Blood, but in all three novels what keeps the story from being boring or frustrating despite this fact is the sheer complexity of the world that each of these mysteries introduces us to. So yes, sometimes the detectives take us on a completely unnecessary runaround when the obvious suspect is staring them in the face, but we usually learn a lot of interesting things in that runaround. The second criticism is that, in an SFF field that tends to be pretty critical of empires, Bennett delivers books in which the empire is, at worst, a necessary evil, and often far better than the alternatives on offer—in A Drop of Corruption, a sclerotic, slave-holding monarchy whose leaders would rather keep their people in poverty because it lets them hold on to their power. This, again, is a fair cop, and all I can say about it is that after three books, it's clearly the buy-in for everything Bennett does with these books that is fun and interesting. In some places I even enjoy how brazenly he inserts his political obsession du jour into the story, such as the interlude in A Trade of Blood in which we learn how horrible industrial meat production is. But I can certainly understand readers for whom it is a turn-off.

Should it win the Hugo? Obviously not. It was already a little hard to justify The Tainted Cup's win last year, but that was at least a novel that was doing something fresh in a very accomplished way. A Drop of Corruption (and A Trade of Blood after it) are offering more of the excellent same, which is quite impressive and will no doubt earn Bennett a Best Series nomination sooner rather than later. But there is no point giving a Hugo to something that has already won it.

Next we have Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor. Part fictionalized autobiography, part metafiction, this novel alternates between the life of a disabled, Nigerian-American author, in a near-future that features self-driving cars and assistive exoskeletons, and excerpts from her bestselling novel about robots in a post-apocalyptic future. I reviewed this book last year, and came away feeling very ambivalent. There are parts of it I admire and parts I didn't care for, and I'm not sure that they all tie together in a coherent way. My biggest problem with Death of the Author as a Hugo nominee is that the parts of it that are most interesting are the ones that are the least SFnal, in which heroine Zelu tries to cope with her stifling, uncomprehending family, or feels torn between her Nigerian and American identities. These are also often the chapters that are most challenging and uncomfortable to read. Okorafor seems to delight in making her heroine do cancellable things, whether that's adamantly ignoring her publisher and fans' expectation that she start writing the promised sequel to her bestselling novel, or sleeping with a student. It's hard not to respect a writer who dares you to dislike their main character the way Okorafor does, but again, none of this feels very relevant to what the Hugo should be about.

As a lot of readers have noted, the idea that Rusted Robots, the novel-within-a-novel that Zelu writes, is a global runaway bestseller strains credulity quite a bit. But more importantly for the purposes of a discussion of a Hugo shortlist, it's not even a particularly interesting science fiction novel, recycling ideas that were more thoroughly explored in Okorafor's other work. Perhaps the place where Death of the Author comes closest to exploring ideas that Hugo voters might be interested in are the passages that examine how just-around-the-corner technologies can transform people's lives, especially disabled people like Zelu. But this is by far the least-explored aspect of the novel, and sometimes reads like an infomercial for technologies that don't even exist. The fact that Okorafor even decided to weave together these disparate parts is perhaps Death of the Author's most admirable choice, something that hardly any other science fiction novel of the last few years has even attempted. But the result doesn't entirely come together.

Should it win the Hugo? I respect the Hugo voters for putting Death of the Author on this year's Best Novel ballot. Given how much this award has leaned toward fun, fluffy work in recent years, I really thought this book would prove too challenging to shortlist. But for all that, I think both the novel's failures, and the fact that its successes are mostly concentrated in its non-SFnal parts, should disqualify it from winning the award.

Up next is Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky, the last in a loose trilogy of standalone SF novels that the ever-prolific Tchaikovsky produced in 2024 and 2025. I reviewed the first two novels in this grouping, Service Model and Alien Clay, but not Shroud. Which increasingly feels like a mistake, because the further I get away from it, the more it feels as if Shroud squares some of the issues that both of those novels had, and is a more complete, more coherent work than either of them, for all that it has garnered a great deal less attention. Like Alien Clay, Shroud is set in a repressive, autocratic society (hyper-capitalist rather than, as in that novel, fascist). But it is much better at constructing a main character who is believably a product of that society. Who can't help but view herself and her colleagues in terms of productivity and efficiency, even as she recognizes how diseased that worldview is. Who, when she finally rebels against the system, can only do so within the terms that she was brought up with. To the reader, this act of rebellion—placing the wellbeing of another person above the the company and its bottom line—might seem like the bare minimum; but it's the biggest thing the heroine can imagine, and this says more about how blighted her life and psyche have been than the grand guignol finale of Alien Clay managed.

Shroud is also, like many Tchaikovsky novels, a first contact story, and as such it offers the predictable—but no less delightful—pleasures of learning the biology, lifecycle, and social organization of a Tchaikovsky alien. That these aliens are freer, and better able to value the lives and opinions of others, than the humans who can barely comprehend them, is an obvious but still quite effective device. But they are also delightfully weird in themselves, and it's fun to work out how their society orders itself while the human characters are still struggling to understand what they're looking at. More importantly, alternating between the oppressiveness of life under the corporate autocracy, and the freewheeling exploration of the alien society, helps Shroud avoid the "all high concept, no third act" problem that afflicts Service Model and other Tchaikovsky novels. It sometimes feels as if Tchaikovsky lacks a middle gear between novellas and multi-volume series, but Shroud is an example of getting the novel-length work right. I wish that more people had discovered it, instead of it being overshadowed by its two predecessors.

Should it win the Hugo? Well, I doubt that it will, because as noted both Service Model and Alien Clay have cast a long shadow, and probably not enough people have discovered Shroud in time for the Hugo deadline. (Also, there's a strong consensus—to which I subscribe—that Tchaikovsky's best work in 2025 is actually his continuation of the Tyrant Philosophers series, which again means that Shroud has been overshadowed.) But yes, I think a win for Shroud would be one of the most defensible on the shortlist.

Alix E. Harrow's The Everlasting is one of the most beloved SFF novels published last year, and for the first 150 pages of it, I completely understood why. Those pages, in which a minor historian in a repressive, fascistic society that is engaged in a war of expansion is sent back in time to compile the official history of the nation's greatest knight, do an excellent job of putting you in the head of a thoroughly unpleasant person. A man who has not so much bought into his society's fascist ideas, as he completely lacks the courage and intellectual integrity to go against its prevailing currents, even when they deem him a second-class citizen. There's a caustically funny running gag in these pages, in which the narrator repeatedly discovers something about the knight that runs against the repressive values he's been taught—that she is queer, that her great victories were nothing of the sort—and immediately decides that his definitive, "true" history will leave that part of the story out.

Unfortunately, the actual business of The Everlasting is redeeming this character, not through any meaningful growth in his understanding of the world, but through romantic love. The later parts of the novel are an—admittedly, quite sweeping and compelling—star-crossed romance in which two figures separated by time and a hissable villain, attempt again and again to make their way back to each other. With each iteration, the historian becomes more and more heroic, not so much because his consciousness has been raised as because love makes him so—or, to put it another way, because the narrative needs him to be so in order to be acceptable as a romantic hero. (Also, for a novel about a fascist who is redeemed by love, The Everlasting sure makes a lot of snide comments about how useless liberals are.)

Framing this love story is the idea that by writing new and more purposeful version of the knight's story, the villain of the novel (whose cynical girlboss slogans feel very much of a piece with the aforementioned liberal-bashing) can remake her society, directing it in a more militaristic, supremacist direction. You might be able to ignore the question of why one needs magic to achieve this goal—real-world autocrats have rewritten and repurposed history quite happily without recourse to a time machine—but as Roseanna Pendlebury writes in her excellent review of the book, the idea that there is a one-to-one relationship between what's written in a national myth, and how that nation takes form in the modern era, is a vast oversimplification of how the study and exploitation of history actually work. Taken together with the way the love story is designed to overpower any objections we might have to the main character's fascism, this makes The Everlasting a shallow, facile novel, one whose popularity feels more than a little depressing.

Should it win the Hugo? I think you know my answer to that question.

Emily Tesh's The Incandescent starts from a simple but instantly compelling premise: what if you told the magical school story from the perspective of the teachers? A former teacher herself, Tesh creates a thoroughly believable world in Chetwood School, a posh boarding school for the magically inclined, and an utterly winning—if also self-regarding and self-mythologizing—heroine in deputy head Saffy Walden, who juggles board meetings, budget squeezes, and pastoral care with demons who would like to devour her students. All of this would be more than enough to be going on with—one can easily imagine a version of The Incandescent that is just a fun adventure novel about a cool, verging-on-middle-age, disaster bisexual teacher who kills demons by night and talks students out of dropping out by day. But as I wrote in my review of the novel, Tesh's real interest is in all the things that go unsaid in Dark Academia (not to mention, the conversation about education in the real world): the role of money and class in education; the way that a good school is a stepping stone to a good life not because of what you learn in it, but because it stamps you as one of the right people; the fact that learning an esoteric discipline like magic (or Greek or Classics) is sometimes less about your academic interests as it is a way of ensuring easy admission to an undersubscribed university major, followed by law school or an MBA.

If there's a problem with The Incandescent, in fact, it's that there is so much to say on this topic, and only one book (so far) that has tried to say it. As a result, the novel ends up feeling a little baggy. Not unlike Tesh's previous, Hugo-winning novel Some Desperate Glory, there's about a trilogy's worth of material crammed into this book. Saffy's battles with demons, and her meditations on the state of education, vie for space with an elaborate love triangle, a tragic backstory, students in need of support, and some truly well-crafted scenes that examine how teaching works and how it achieves its goals. By the time the book's climax arrives, it feels as if several different stories have been told. But this is as much a point of praise as it is a complaint. Though she hasn't handled it as elegantly as she did in Some Desperate Glory, Tesh has given the reader a hell of a lot to chew on with this book, and if one turns the last page wishing there had been more space to discuss some of the ideas the novel raises, that's perhaps a gauntlet thrown to other authors of Dark Academia, more than a criticism of this one particular book.

Should it win the Hugo? The main argument against it is that it's only been two years since Tesh took the top prize, for a novel that was much tighter and better-crafted than this one. But otherwise, yes, this would be a very deserving win, for the topicality of its subject, and the implicit criticism it makes of a popular fantasy subgenre, as much as for its own virtues as a novel.

Finally, we come to The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson, a secondary world fantasy in which an awkward, socially inept courtier finds herself competing in a tournament to become the next emperor, while also solving the murder of the person whose spot she has filled. I picked up an ARC of this book at a reading holiday last year, after several friends gave it enthusiastic thumbs up. My reaction was in line with theirs. For such a chonk of a novel, The Raven Scholar is surprisingly fleet-footed, juggling a compelling mystery, an interesting setting, and some engaging relationships. I know that some readers have been exasperated by the novel's Hunger Games-style framework, but I found it very effective. The individual challenges make for propulsive set pieces, while also holding on to the knowledge that this is a game with real stakes, played by people with real power, and therefore that the real game is happening out of sight. Add to this a flock of supercilious ravens who narrate the entire thing, while dropping in bits of history that complicate the story, and the result was an utterly charming fantasy doorstopper.

Charming, however, is a situational quality. A book that's a delightful discovery as an ARC picked up on a whim has a lot more expectations riding on it when it's on the shortlist for the best SFF novel of the year. As much as I enjoyed The Raven Scholar (and am looking forward to its sequel), I was a little surprised to find it on the Hugo shortlist. I can't help but wonder what other books it pushed off the ballot—personally, I would have preferred to see qntm's There is No Antimemetics Division, or Silvia Park's Luminous, on the ballot instead.

Should it win the Hugo? I think I'd be fine with Hodgson winning the Astounding Award—though even there, there's a bit of category fraud involved given that she'd previously published a quartet of mystery novels; it's a bit frustrating that Silvia Park was ruled ineligible for the Astounding because of one short story publication while Hodgson can have an entire previous career and still win the award; plus, my top vote still goes to Jared Pechaček, author of The West Passage. But in the Best Novel category, The Raven Scholar feels too slight for the big prize.

So who will win? There's a popular saying about the Oscars that the winner isn't the best film, but the one with the best narrative. The Hugos might work the same way. The Everlasting is a book by a popular author, who has not had a real shot at Best Novel before, and whose book is genuinely well liked across a broad spectrum of the fandom. It's hard to imagine any of the other nominees overcoming that combination of factors. And since that is the one novel on this shortlist that I genuinely dislike, I guess you can tell how I feel about the Hugos this year. Still, when the nominations open for the 2027 awards in a few months, I know that I'll be right there with some of my favorite reads from this year. Maybe next year I can write another one of these roundups with a happier conclusion.

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