Hugo Awards 2026: Ballots for Best Novel, Best Related Work, and Best Young Adult Book

This is the second of my posts covering my 2026 Hugo Awards. Here, I discuss the categories where the finalists are (mostly) books: Best Novel, Best Related Work, and Best Young Adult Book. My practice is to do full blog posts on all Best Novel finalists, and any books that strike my fancy in other categories (such as Inventing the Reniassance); if I have done this, the title of the finalist will link you to the post. Otherwise, the link is to the finalist itself, if it is freely available online. This means my Best Novel writeups are shorted and mostly focus on relative ranking, as the full writeups have my big-picture thougts about the finalists.

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Best Novel

6. Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky

 

Despite my comment below, I did end up ranking something lower than Death of the Author. This book was 95% boring; Death of the Author was only, like, 33% boring (just the excerpts from Rusted Robots). Tchaikovsky is frustrating, because I believe I could like him, based on his premises... but I just don't vibe, apparently.

 

5. Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

 

If while reading The Everlasting (see below), I thought, "This is going to be the one to beat," while reading Death of the Author, I thought exactly the opposite: "This is going to be the one everyone beats." I liked the frame story, about an Nigerian-American science fiction writer struggling with her family and her disability, but the whole book was sunk by the inclusion of the supposedly amazing novel that character writes, which I hated reading. 

4. The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson

I thought this was very well done, solid fantasy. That is to say, I don't think it's breaking down genre barriers. I don't think it wanted to. But if you want to read a book that does what a fantasy book should do and does it well, I think you could do a lot worse than this. I enjoyed it a lot, and it's a solid Hugo contender.

3. A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett

I enjoyed this book a lot. It's a solid fantasy police procedural, combining several things that I enjoy into a single book. I would probably even go so far as to say that it's a better book than The Everlasting, in that it sets out to do something and accomplishes it, which I don't think Everlasting quite does, even though Everlasting is more ambitious. But Bennett won last year for the first book in this series, and when it comes to awards, I have a definite bias against sequels: let's fete something that hasn't been feted before.

2. The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow

As noted in my review of this book (linked above), "[a]t the two-thirds mark, I thought this book was the one to beat. Unfortunately, the last third or so moves the book in a different direction..." If the rest of the book had been like the first two thirds, I definitely would have placed it first without even having read the rest of the shortlist. The ending, however, was not as good as what had come before. Which isn't to say I don't want to see it win—I think it's very good—but I don't think it's such an obvious victor as it might have been had it gone in a slightly different direction.

1. The Incandescent by Emily Tesh

What does one look for in a Hugo winner? Well, I can't answer for anyone else, but for me, the book needs to 1) be very good, but also 2) do something interesting with or to the genre. Or more precisely, be very good because of the way it engages with the genre. The Incandescent is exactly this. Tesh has very clearly read Harry Potter and many other "magic school" books and thought through how they operate. Add that to a strong sense of character and a clever plot, and this is exactly the kind of book—much like Tesh's previous finalist, Some Desperate Glory, that should be winning awards. Sometimes I mind repeat finalists, but this book is so different from her previous one but just as good. (Though, as she's pointed out in interviews, they are both about education.)

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Best Related Work

7. History of Westeros: "Ragnarök vs. The Long Night" by Aziz and Ashaya

 

When I saw this was on YouTube, I thought it would be a deep dive YouTube documentary like previous Best Related Work finalists such as Lindsay Ellis's Hobbit videos or Jenny Nicholson's My Little Pony and Star Wars videos. To my utter bafflement, however, it turns out to be... just a podcast! One that's over two hours long!? And it just has a single host talking!!? And then people not only listen to this, but actually watch it!?!? Like, there's literally nothing to see other than a guy with a beard sitting in front of a map with a microphone!?!??! I appreciate intellectually that we all like different things, I guess, but what is wrong with people!!!???! I listen to a few podcasts regularly, but they all come out of the public radio space and do interesting thing with the audio medium, with guests and sound effects and host interaction and stuff. If I want a bunch of facts about a topic, surely I could just read a book? And indeed, this podcast is mostly just a guy relaying you facts he learned from reading a book! Supposedly it's to give you a better understanding of Ragnarök, and thus the "Long Night" from A Song of Ice and Fire, but I felt like the connections he made between the two were pretty banal and uninteresting. I couldn't believe we went through so much buildup for so little insight. Anyway, this is so bad I'd rather see literally anything else win, even though some of those other things I have strong philosophical reasons for not wanting to see win!

6. The Hugo Awards spreadsheet by Renay

 

This is a huge spreadsheet where fans can submit things they'd like to highlight for Hugo nominations for the benefit of other fans. It is reorganized every year by a single volunteer (it has no connection to Worldcon), and I think it is a very neat project! However, longtime readers know there are two things I hate in "Best Related Work" finalists: things that are not "works" as I see them (e.g., prose writing or video content), and things that are about the Hugos themselves. This is both. I think it is very cool! It's just not at all the kind of thing I think we should give a Hugo Award to.

 

5. Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction by Paul Kincaid

 

Briardene Books is a small UK publisher who puts out exactly one book per year. Their strategy (I say "their," but as far as I know, Briardene is exactly one person, Niall Harrison) seems to be to put out books collecting work by well-regarded UK sf critics; publishing only one per year means they can make sure every release lands on the ballot for the Hugo Award for Best Related Work. In general, I have enjoyed all the Briardene Books I have read; I ranked Niall Harrison's All These Worlds first in 2024 and Abigail Nussbaum's Track Changes second in 2025. This year's Briardene finalist is Colourfields by Paul Kincaid, who was previously a finalist in Best Related Work in 2017 for his monograph about Iain M. Banks, which I ranked first. (Will Briardene's just-released collection of the late Christopher Priest's nonfiction be a finalist in 2027? I suspect so.)

 

Like All These Worlds and Track Changes, Colourfields collects reviews, but whereas those books mostly collected reviews of sf, Colourfields mostly collects (as the subtitle indicates) reviews of sf criticism. I know Kincaid is a cogent and interesting critic from reading Iain M. Banks, but it turns out that reviewing other people's criticism is a difficult place to demonstrate that. This pointed me to a couple works of sf criticism that I ought to read, but it's hard to get a good sense of Kincaid's actual positions from this, other than that 1) he likes to claim sf is undefinable, 2) he doesn't like Darko Suvin, and 3) he has lots of thoughts about the New Wave. Unlike All These Worlds and Track Changes, one doesn't get the sense of a cogent worldview when it comes to sf. I think most of these reviews were perfectly fine, even good... but a bunch of reviews of sf criticism probably work a lot better in their original contexts than they do collected together, and I soon got pretty bored. Frustratingly, though, when Kincaid does briefly turn to reviewing some actual sf (a few novels by M. John Harrison), I was still bored, as these read more like lengthy plot synopses than critique. So I've ended up ranking it below Inventing the Renaissance, which is maybe a bit unfair, but I think Palmer was up to something interesting in a way that Kincaid is not, at least not here.

 

(Pedantic Wellsian note: in his review of John Rieder's Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, Kincaid says, "I doubt very much whether Wells had either the dodo or the Tasmanians specifically in mind when he wrote this novel [The War of the Worlds]"... but Wells specifically mentions both the dodo and the Tasmanians in the sixth paragraph of The War of the Worlds. It's right there on the second page of the book! C'mon, dude.)

 

4. Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer

 

As I said in my full post about this book, "There are two ways to think about every Hugo finalist, of course: how good of a book is it, and how good of a finalist is it. In many cases these are pretty much the same thing, but in some cases they are very different. Inventing the Renaissance is a good example of a finalist where they are very different." I actually think that Inventing the Renaissance is a better book than Positive Obsession. However, this category is called "Best Related Work"... and this is not really related to science fiction or fantasy at all. It's a history and historiography of the Renaissance! It was pretty clearly nominated because the author is someone science fiction fans like because she wrote science fiction novels.

 

3. No Award

Ada Palmer wrote a blog post trying to justify why Inventing the Renaissance would count as a "related work" when it was announced as a finalist in the similar BSFA Award category... and to be honest, I expected better of her as a writer. Not that she should have turned down the nomination or anything, but the attempt at justification is not very good and uncharacteristically lacks intellectual rigor. Her argument is basically: 

1. "[I]t is peppered with direct genre references."
2. It's about how people want to return to an imagined Golden Age, which is something that happens in science fiction sometimes, e.g., Asimov's Foundation.
3. Palmer's narrative techniques are taken from sf. 

I think most of these are bad: 

1. Surely the bar for "related work" must be higher than this.
2. I originally had an objection here to her second point, on the basis that "[t]here are lots of topics that inspire lots of science fiction, and where better understanding those topics would help us better understand science fiction, but that doesn't make works on those topics related to science fiction," but then I was reminded that in 2024, A City on Mars was a finalist, and that was a book entirely about the reality of Mars colonization, not the depiction of Mars colonization in sf... and I ranked it second! So I think I have to buy Palmer's claim here. Although, if I'm honest, I don't think reading Inventing the Renaissance gives you very much insight into Foundation.
3. Basically, Palmer learned about cross-cutting between storylines from anime. Like, okay, sure, I guess... but actually no. You could have also learned about that by reading Charles Dickens. One of her other supposed sf techniques is that "The book is also woven through with fun but unnecessary Shakespeare references, which persistently pop up as examples of things or ways of expressing things, just as some fantasy narrators constantly bring in quotes from an in-world literary figure, as Dune quotes the works of Princess Irulan." But surely Dune does that because that's what real histories do to begin with! Quoting things is not an sf technique! Palmer then has a whole long thing about how a lot of Inventing the Renaissance is written in the first person. I agree that this is interesting and a point in the book's favor, but she never even explains how this is an sf narrative technique beyond that every sf novel she's written has been in the first person. The first person is hardly a narrative technique with any unique connection to sf! Like, c'mon! In any case, using an sf-derived narrative technique doesn't make your book related to sf.

What I find really frustrating is that I think there was a better defense she could have made, even if I wouldn't have bought that either: Inventing the Renaissance is (partially) about how our way of understanding the world has changed over time, how it came to incorporate empiricism and rational observation... and without those things, you can't even have science, and thus you can't have science fiction! It is no coincidence that sf emerges in the early 1800s, and it's as a result of the very processes Palmer describes in this book. That would have been a much more compelling claim of Inventing the Renaissance as related work than "I learned about quotations from Dune"!

 

Obviously I'm annoyed by this, so Inventing the Renaissance goes below "No Award." I wonder if I would have been this annoyed without the blog post, if she had just let the book be short-listed without comment. Oh well. 

 

2. Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler by Susanna M. Morris

 

I thought this book was okay. I think Octavia Butler is a very interesting writer, and I have rated a lot of her work quite highly. Unfortunately, she may not have been a very interesting person. I don't mean this in a mean way: Morris clearly does her best with a person whose main thing was living by herself and writing a lot. Like, this is very hard to spin a riveting biography out of. Most interesting to me was the discussion of Butler's late-life writer's block and the abortive drafts at a third Parables novel. (One hopes some of that material will get released to the public in some form someday.) It's an okay book about an important sf figure.

 

1. Last War in Albion: The Cuddled Little Vice (Sandman) by Elizabeth Sandifer 

 

Last War in Albion is blogger Elizabeth Sandifer's history of British comics, told through the conceit that Alan Moore and Grant Morrison were engaged in a magical war. This was a single blog post covering Neil Gaiman and The Sandman... one that runs over four hundred pages when formatted for Kindle! If you're able to ignore the conceit, this is a very effective deep dive on both Gaiman as a person in light of recent revelations that he has raped several women, and on him as an artist. Sandifer doesn't shy away from the reality of what he's done, and she places his work and life in the context of his upbringing in Scientology: I didn't even know about this before reading the piece; I feel like most critical work on Gaiman takes his own self-mythology at face value. However, neither does she comb through his work going, "aha! signs he was secretly a rapist all along." (She does have a good analysis of the serial killer Sandman story, which always made me uncomfortable.) But Sandifer is also good at both close reading individual stories and panels of Sandman and in placing Sandman in the context of 1980s comics. If this had been written before everything about Gaiman came out, and didn't discuss the rapes, it would have been a strong piece of criticism, but now it's an essential one. I was never the Gaimanite that some people are, but there's still a disappointment when someone who creates great art turns out to be an awful person, and Sandifer explores that well, too. I find Sandifer's Doctor Who criticism hit-or-miss, but if she wins a Hugo for this, it will be well-deserved. Far and away the best thing on the ballot.

 

(Fun fact: the copyeditor of the ebook edition provided in the Hugo voting packet is Sean Dillon, who took my British Literature II class at UConn some twelve years ago! Obviously I taught him everything he knows about Between the Acts.)

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Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book

[UNRANKED] Oathbound by Tracy Deonn 

This is the third book in Deonn's Legendborn cycle, where Arthurian knights are for some reason reincarnated at UNC Chapel Hill. I read the first book when it was a finalist in 2020, and mostly had just complaints about it. Thus, I skipped the second book when it was a finalist in 2023, and I'm skipping the third now. In the unlikely event that it does win the category, I suppose I'll give it a go as part of my quest to read all Hugo-winning books I haven't already read. (I would reach it in 2051.)

 

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

I groaned when I saw the title of this book on the shortlist. In general, I think people should enjoy what they want to enjoy... except that I find the enjoyment of "cozy" fiction morally suspect. This book is about two high school girls, one from our universe, the other from a magic alternate timeline; one accidentally falls into the other's universe, and they both begin to fall for each other. Of course we have alternating first-person narration, and it is tedious. One of them: "gosh im so attracted to her but i dont know if this will work out." The other one: "gosh im so attracted to her but i dont know if this will work out." Will it work out? Yes, duh. But somehow, it's over four hundred pages. Anyway, I do have to admit 1) this isn't quite "cozy" fiction; unlike, say, Legends & Lattes, there are actual stakes and obstacles here, and there are greater aspirations than "being a small business owner who is a 'nice' boss and friends with the mob," and 2) it's very much not aimed at me, so whether I enjoyed it or not is honestly kind of beside the point. However, I found the worldbuilding of the fantasy universe pretty shallow, and surely there's better stuff going on in YA sf&f than this.

4. Holy Terrors by Margaret Owen

This is the third book in a trilogy where I have not read the first two. Loathe to add still more reading to my over 8,000 pages of Hugo reading (I don't know how long the first two books are, but this one is almost 600 pages), I did not read the first two books, despite the excoriations of the author in the voting packet. She helpfully did include a summary of the first two books... unfortunately this summary was itself over 30,000 words, so I wasn't going to read it either! I actually didn't find the plot too hard to follow; what was hard to follow was that there were dozens of characters to keep track of (I think at least fifty!), and they weren't really introduced to the reader. More helpful than a blow-by-blow summary might have been a list of all the characters and how they relate to the protagonist.

Anyway, this is about a magical righter of wrongs, whose foster parents are Death and Fortune (???); her ex-boyfriend is a police officer, which caused issues (she's less concerned about law than justice), but they Still Have Feelings even though he's engaged. Meanwhile, there's an election going on to pick a new emperor, and participants are being killed off... by someone masquerading as her. So she needs to prove herself innocent and stop the real killer. This was all fine and reasonably engaging, but definitely suffered from me not knowing who all the victims and suspects were. The two big things I had a hard time with, plot-wise, were that 1) there is a bit where the protagonist herself is mind-controlled for a whole week, but just seems to shrug it off, and 2) at the end, the antagonist creates an alternate timeline, which is a level of magic way beyond anything the book previously indicated was possible.

Anyway, I enjoyed it to the extent that I could, and it's definitely more interesting than Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe, but I don't think I can rank it above anything else where I actually knew what was going on! 

3. Among Ghosts by Rachel Hartman

This is the fifth book in Hartman's "Southlands" sequence. I previously read the third and fourth when they were Lodestar finalists; I loved the third, Tess of the Road, and ranked it first in 2019, whereas my thoughts about the fourth, In the Serpent's Wake, were more mixed. Among Ghosts is about a different character in the same world and so is otherwise unconnected to the other books. It was interesting to note that Hartman seems to be pushing herself here a bit; both Tess of the Road and In the Serpent's Wake were journey narratives, where a main character learns about herself by travelling across a world. But Among Ghosts is the exact opposite: its main character spends the entire novel in a single location, and learns about himself as different people travel through his location. This is a neat concept, but I do think it deflates the energy of the narrative a bit, as it didn't always seem like there was a lot of urgency or like the main character was trying to do much. Overall, I would say it was a perfectly fine piece of YA fiction... but I wish I would read another Hartman that I loved as much as Tess!

2. They Bloom at Night by Trang Thanh Tran

Like Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe, I don't think a postapocalyptic queer Vietnamese-American zombie coming-of-age story is really aimed at me. Unlike Coffeeship in an Alternate Universe, I thought the story was up to something interesting, and I thought it was well told. A strong sense of character and theme, and the kind of thing WSFS ought to be rewarding in the YA space, in my opinion.

1. Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins

Though I enjoyed the original Hunger Games novels, especially the first, well enough, I went into this with a faint sense of dread. Did we really need a bunch of prequels? Particularly one about something as obvious as what Haymitch's go in the Hunger Games had been like? It felt like a cash-in. Well, my guess is the movies based on these prequels probably are cash-ins, and still no one's ever going to get me to go back to read The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, but I enjoyed this a lot. Like The Hunger Games, Collins explores what are obligations to one another are when survival is at stake. I found the contrast between Haymitch and Katniss very interesting. Katniss is very closed off emotionally: she doesn't really care about anyone other than herself and her family, it takes a lot for her to admit someone into her life. (This isn't a criticism of Katniss; I think she has good reasons to be this way.) This means that Katniss struggles when she becomes a political figure, because a politics of care is something she views with a lot of suspicion. What I didn't realize until reading this book about how different Haymitch is. If Katniss's problem is that she doesn't care about other people enough, Haymitch's is that he cares too much; he too readily admits other people into his emotional life. (This could be trite, I think, but Collins carries it off very well.) This is probably a good survival strategy in its own way... but yikes, what an awful attitude to have if you're going into a life-or-death struggle where you will literally have to kill everyone you meet! And indeed, that's what makes Sunrise on the Reaping so good: reading The Hunger Games, you knew things would turn out okay for Katniss to some degree. But reading Sunrise, you know that will not be the case for Haymitch. You know everyone he befriends will be dead, you know their deaths will accomplish nothing, you know Haymitch's plans will come to nothing, you know Haymitch will end up a depressed alcoholic whose greatest accomplishment was really nothing at all. And he's just a kid! Good stuff, in the sense that it really makes you feel awful.

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Final Thoughts

I think Best Novel was... fine this year. Four of the six authors are repeat finalists in this category (and one of the others has been a finalist in many other categories), but none of them are so overrepresented as to make me grumpy, and I can see why they all were finalists even when I didn't particularly enjoy them. (Adrian Tchaikovsky doesn't do it for me, I guess, but I can see why he would do it for someone.) The Incandescent and The Everlasting in particular are books doing interesting things well, and even if I didn't enjoy Death of the Author, one can't deny Okorafor's trying to do something interesting too. And while some other categories were very samey this year (so many fairy tale riffs in the short fiction categories), you can't make that complaint about this lot. Mostly fantasy, unfortunately, but diverse fantasy at least.  

 

Based on Reddit, Shroud will win... but I doubt it. Will Bennett repeat? I kind of think so. However, The Everlasting seems surprisingly popular. On the other hand, I don't think it will be Raven Scholar.

 

I always have Thoughts about Best Related Work: this year, three of six finalists are books, though another is a book-length blog post, so that's not too bad. But one of the books is nothing to do with sf, and clearly nominated on the basis of the author, not the topic. (Though I discuss A City on Mars as also not being sf above, it at least was nominated on the basis of its topic.) I am too lazy to go through the history of the award since 1980 to see if this has ever happened before, but it's unprecedented in my ten years of voting. Anyway, I really want to see Cuddled Little Vice win, it's clearly the best thing in the category by a mile. I would guess Ada Palmer has a real chance, though. Maybe Colourfields at the outside, though the previous Briardene finalists haven't won, and (to me) this is clearly the weakest.

 

Finally, I though this was a fine Lodestar ballot too. The tricky things about this category are 1) the Hugo electorate has weird tastes in YA fiction, and 2) a lot of this work is very much not for me. But there's always a couple things I enjoy the opportunity of experiencing, and this year was no exception: Sunrise on the Reaping and They Bloom at Night were both very good, and I'm glad this made me aware of Among Ghosts. I kind of feel like Sunrise will win; surely The Hunger Games would have had the award existed back when it came out. I am fairly certain neither Holy Terrors nor Oathbound will place well.

Hugo Awards 2026: What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher

This is the third book in T. Kingfisher's "Sworn Soldier" sequence, a series of novellas narrated by Alex Easton, a nonbinary (sort of) retired soldier from a Ruritanian country in the late nineteenth century. Like the first two, it is a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Novella.

What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher

Published: 2025
Acquired: May 2026
Read: July 2026

As is often the case with series that end up being Hugo finalists repeatedly, I enjoyed the first one a lot, but am a little skeptical about the fact that it keeps being nominated. The second one was nowhere near as good as the first. There are two factors here. One is similar to what affected the Murderbot novellas, in my estimation, is that part of what made the first book engaging was the voice of the narrator, but obviously what is novel in book one will not be novel anymore in later installments. I like Alex Easton a lot, but is their voice original in book three the way it was in book one? Of course, that doesn't make the book less good but it does perhaps make it less award-worthy.

The other reason I liked book two less is because it used its science fictional premise less interestingly. Book one was surely not hard sf, but it did take the idea that someone might be possessed by fungus with a certain level of seriousness, thinking through the premise in a way I didn't recall ever seeing before, and I enjoyed that aspect of it a lot. Book two, on the other hand, had what seemed to me to be an explanation that didn't rise beyond the level of "magic." Which was fine, but not what drew me to the series to begin with.

Book three, I am happy to say, is more like book one in that regard than book two. Though, again, this is surely not hard sf, Kingfisher has thought through a common sf&f idea and done her best to justify it, and I appreciated that a lot. Unfortunately, this isn't done as smoothly as in book one; we get a big chunk of exposition to make it all clear. But, I guess, the big chunk of exposition is a hard sf staple! Anyone, it's fun, T. Kingfisher always is... though I do wish she would go back to doing coming-of-age stuff, I find her more interesting in that mode than in horror.

"Meet Jennifer Mays, New York's prettiest detective, and Gabriel Webb, amateur sleuth and true crime writer, in another fair-play whodunit -- challenging you to solve the mystery as it unfolds!": The Maze Agency #6–23

The first four or five issues of The Maze Agency have been collected two or three times, by my reckoning. However, the original series ran twenty-three issues plus an annual and a special, and aside from one story from the annual and one from the special, none of that material has ever been collected. But it is all available on the secondary market for pretty reasonable prices.

Interestingly, the series was cancelled by publisher Comico after June 1989's issue #7, but the series was picked up by Innovation Comics... even continuing the numbering with December 1989's issue #8! (Issue #8 credits Comico editor Michael Eury, so I'd guess the issue was originally prepared for them.) If you're trying to read it all in order, note that special #1 was published between issues #12 and 13, and annual #1 between issues #15 and 16. It is very clear that the comic struggled in the comics market of the 1980s and '90s; it had acclaim, but never a wide audience. (It probably doesn't help that once Adam Hughes gets snapped up to draw JLA, the series never really has a regular penciller again; Hughes draws #8, 9, and 12; the other fifteen issues of the regular series feature eleven different pencillers.)

If you've read the first five issues, how these ones unfold won't be a big surprise to you: every issue features a done-in-one murder mystery when Jen and Gabe solve the crime. Supposedly they are all "fair-play whodunits," meaning the reader can look at all the clues and solve the mystery too. I didn't really attempt to do this because, though I enjoy reading them, I am not "good" at murder mysteries. Only one time, with issue #11's "…Twas the Crime Before Christmas…" (pencils by Robb Phipps), did I even come close, thanks to a very obvious clue about color blindness. In some stories, the explanations can get pretty convoluted, but that's all part of the genre in my experience; you've just got to roll with it. (I found #9's "The English Channeler Mystery: A Problem In Deduction" particularly far-fetched; I must not have been the only one, because someone actually writes into the lettercol with a completely different solution, claiming it fits all the facts, though writer Mike Barr disagrees. I also thought the "clues" in the one about a group of authors being murdered, #16's "If Books Could Kill…", beggared belief, though all the book stuff was quite fun.)

But when it hits, it hits. These are almost never not pleasurable in the way that murder mysteries ought to be pleasurable: fun characters, including some engaging cops for our leads to interact with, enjoyable pulling together of threads and ideas. I particularly enjoyed the aforementioned Christmas story in #11; the one where Jen's police ally herself becomes a suspect, #15's "Too Much Bliss" (art by Mike Okamoto, Mike Witherby, and Rick Magyar); and the one about a homophobic serial killer, #21's "Valentine's Slay." Surely the best of all, though, was issue #14's "Before Midnight" (pencils by Robb Phipps), where a death-row inmate who Jen helped put away is murdered just before his execution. Really tense and clever and well put together.

And though, as I said, the series never regains a regular penciller, there's still some solid artwork across these issues. I particularly liked Mary Mitchell's pencils on issues #16 and 21. (Alas, it doesn't seem like she had much of a subsequent career; her last credited work on League of Comic Geeks is a ten-page story in Marvel Valentine Special #1 from 1997.) I was also pleased to see some early-career work from Rob Davis on #19, who went on to do some excellent art and writing for Doctor Who Magazine from 2007 to 2011. Rick Magyar does most of the inks from issue #8 to 14, which helps maintain consistency, and he's definitely good value.

I only have two real complaints about this run. The first is that it stretches credulity for me when people investigate murders professionally just happen to encounter a murder mystery. I get this is a feature of the genre, but it gets overused a bit: in #6, Jen and Gabe go on vacation and encounter a murder, then in #7, they go to visit Jen's parents and encounter a murder, and then in #8 there's a murder in Gabe's apartment building. Quite a run there! Similarly, issues #16, 17, and 19 all feature murders they just happen to bump into, rather than ones Jen is hired to solve. It's a device that needs to be used more sparingly.

The other is that I felt like in the earlier issues Barr was setting up some stuff about how the two of them met that never gets paid off. A lot of the early issues revolve around Gabe wanted more of a relationship while Jen is reluctant, and I really enjoyed seeming them slowly grow closer together. But it seemed like the early issues implied there was a bit of a story there, and we never get to hear it. Also there's a lot of focus on Jen's family... but what about Gabe's? (Maybe I just wanted a story set in Ohio.)

The special and the annual are also good stuff. Special #1 sees Jen and Gabe solve three murders in one day, each one drawn by a different artist. I particularly liked the one based around Jen's haircut, "Afternoon: Murder by a Hair," one of the only times Rick Magyar provides pencils. Annual #1 is mostly a Spirit tribute (art by Rick Magyar, Darick Robertson, & Wm. Messner-Loebs); I haven't read any Spirit, but the stylistic diversion is enjoyable. 

All that said... if you like well-constructed comics and fun characters, this is definitely a highlight of the medium and the genre. It's a shame no one has ever crowdfunded some kind of definitive omnibus collection, but they're worth tracking down for sure. 

This is the second in a series of posts about Mike W. Barr's The Maze Agency. The next covers volume 2 from Caliber. Previous installments are listed below:

1. The Maze Agency vol. 1 #1-5 (1988-90)

Reading Roundup Wrapup: July 2026

Pick of the month: The Cuddled Little Vice by Elizabeth Sandifer. As of when I write this, I have read all but one of of the finalists for the Hugo Award for Best Related Work; however, it's hard for me to imagine that the remaining one will exceed this, a lengthy deep dive on Neil Gaiman and The Sandman.

All books read:

1. Star Trek: The Original Series: Harm’s Way by David Mack
2. Oz-story Magazine, Number Three edited by David Maxine
3. Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion by Malcolm Hulke
4. A Wizard of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel: Book One of Earthsea by Fred Fordham
5. The Power Fantasy, Volume One: The Superpowers by Kieron Gillen and Caspar Wijngaard
6. The Nome King’s Shadow in Oz by Gilbert M. Sprague, illustrated by Donald Abbott
7. Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky
8. Absolute Wonder Woman, Vol. 1: The Last Amazon by Kelly Thompson, Hayden Sherman, Mattia De Iulis, et al.
9. Among Ghosts by Rachel Hartman
10. The Invisible Parade by Leigh Bardugo and John Picacio
11. Last War in Albion: The Cuddled Little Vice (Sandman) by Elizabeth Sandifer
12. What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher
13. A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett

All books acquired:

1. The Human Target: The Deluxe Edition by Tom King, Greg Smallwood, et al.
2. Superman: Space Age by Mark Russell and Michael Allred
3. DC Finest: Batman: Red Skies by Doug Moench, Tom Mandrake, Gene Colan, et al.
4. Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill
5. Fantastic Four by Dan Slott Omnibus, Vol. 1 by Dan Slott, Sean Izaakse, Aaron Kuder, Paco Medina, Sara Pichelli, et al.
6. Crucible of Gold: Book Seven of Temeraire by Naomi Novik
7. Oz-story Magazine, Number Six edited by David Maxine 

Currently reading:

• The Struggle for Mastery: Britain 1066–1284 by David Carpenter
• Sex, Lies and Private Eyes edited by Joe Gentile and Richard Dean Starr
• Star Trek: Vanguard: Declassified by Dayton Ward, Kevin Dilmore, Marco Palmieri, and David Mack
• Victoria’s Secret: Her Life by Lida Bell Lunt
• Young Avengers by Heinberg & Cheung by Allan Heinberg, Jim Cheung, et al. 
• Again, Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison
• Doctor Who and the Space War by Malcolm Hulke
• Crucible of Gold: Book Seven of Temeraire by Naomi Novik
• Legion of Super-Heroes Archives, Volume 8 by Jim Shooter et al.

Prioritizing my Hugo reading means I have fallen behind on all my other reading. I've been reading Struggle for Mastery for months! But just one book to go, so hopefully I can get back on track in August.

Up next in my rotations:

1. Star Trek: Vanguard: What Judgments Come by Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore
2. The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois
3. The Poe Clan Vol. 1 by Moto Hagio 
4. On Progress in Physics and Subjectivity Theory: An Amateur’s Meanderings as Inspiration for Actual Physicists by N. Otre Le Vant 

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 676 (down 2)

Star Trek: Return to the Taurus Reach: Vanguard, Books 4 & 5

I am quite behind on my book reviews, so my original plan was to review the first three Star Trek: Vanguard books here on my blog when I reread them because I had never reviewed them before (they predate my bookbloogging; I do feel like I reviewed book one on the TrekBBS when it came out, but if so, I can't find the post). However, I reviewed books four and five on my old LiveJournal back in the day, so I figured I would repost those reviews here as a way of quickly catching up on my reviews...

...but then when it came time to do that, I found that I just had too many thoughts! So I will repost those old reviews, but also I am going to expand those thoughts. Just as I felt the first three books worked as a single unit, so do books four and five: between them, they tie off a number of the character and plot threads set up in the first two books, especially as regards Reyes, T'Prynn, Pennington, and Quinn.

Of book four, Open Secrets, I originally wrote this:

The Vanguard series continues from the cliffhanger at the end of Reap the Whirlwind, and that plotline was probably my favorite of the many strands running throughout this book. Though Commodore Reyes seemed less than active in his own defense, I feel that despite (or because of) that we learned more about him in this one book than in the previous three. The other plotlines continue to chug along, perturbed by the events of the Federation-Klingon War (as seen in "Errand of Mercy") but otherwise not incredibly remarkable, with the exception of the Pennington/T'Prynn story, which added another interesting layer to my favorite journalist. I'm never quite sure what to think of Vanguard, but I'll certainly be continuing along to Precipice. 

Rereading it over fifteen years later, I feel differently about the Reyes plotline; I think this is because the events of books one through three are fresh in my memory, since I read them months instead of years prior. When I reread the first three books, particularly book one, Harbinger, it was very clear to me that these books were commenting on the post-9/11 security state through a science fiction lens much in the same way that, say, the Battlestar Galactica reboot did. Here, Reyes goes on trial for what he's done... but in a nice twist, not for the unethical things he did, but for the one ethical thing he did, allow Pennington to reveal the truth. I like this idea, but in the end, I feel like—just as was true of the earlier books—we don't get much insight into why Reyes ultimately did what he did, what made these decisions feel compelling to him to begin with. Why was he willing to sacrifice innocent lives and civil rights on the altar of Federation security and state secrets? I honestly still don't really know after reading four books about this guy. (I do finally know why T'Prynn was willing to do this, but we'll discuss that when I get to book five.)

Star Trek: Vanguard: Open Secrets
by Dayton Ward

Published: 2009
Acquired: May 2009
Previously read: June 2009
Reread: April 2026

Outside of the trial, I unfortunately found the book pretty dramatically inert. The book begins with a flash-forward to what was happening on Vanguard during the events of the original series episode "Errand of Mercy"—the Klingons are approaching Vanguard, but as seen in that episode, suddenly both sides' controls get too hot to use and the Organians unliterally end the war. This scene is set in 2267, and then we jump back a year and fill in what got us up to this point. This does the exact opposite of open the book with an exciting tease, unfortunately, as whenever the Klingons are up to something in the rest of the book, the reader knows it's ultimately going to go nowhere because of something that happened in an episode from 1967. I mean, the reader might know this anyway, but we don't need to remind them!

Similar choices dog other aspects of the station narrative. Reyes is replaced as commander of Vanguard Station by Admiral Nogura. Nogura was only mentioned on screen twice, in Star Trek: The Motion Picture where he's Kirk's superior, but to fans of a certain age, he's a well-known figure, thanks to his presence in the 1980s novels. Especially in J. M. Dillard's The Lost Years, where he's called "the Old Man," a revered figure known for how hard he was; he comes out of retirement to take over Starfleet and clean it up following a series of scandals in the novels Dreadnought! and Battlestations! When it was announced that Nogura was going to be in this book I was quite excited... but he doesn't do anything for the entire book. He makes no interesting choices. I know he's not one of the series's ostensible leads... but it also seems weird to me that when Reyes is in command of Vanguard, there are lots of hard choices that constantly need to be made, but as soon as he's not in command, basically this all dries up and Nogura spends him time sitting around in staff meetings. Why bother to use this potentially interesting character if you're not going to do anything interesting with him?

The other major station subplots are about the scientific research happening, and they are similarly devoid of interesting moments. A Tholian defects and joins the scientific operation at Vanguard, giving them valuable information on the Shedai... but the novel only considers this from the angle of the scientific plot. How does Ming Xiong feel about working alongside a representative of the people responsible for the death of a bunch of his friends back in book one? Apparently just fine. Are the station crew curious about the mysterious Tholians? I guess not. The Tholian is there to deliver exposition about the Shedai, and beyond that, no thought has been put into their role in the narrative. Also, Ming gets assigned a boss who relieves him as leader of the science investigations on the station (The Wrath of Khan's Carol Marcus), but he's just fine with it and they get along great. In the long run we'll realize that this happens for "lore" reasons (what Carol learns about the Taurus meta-genome here influences her later work on the Genesis Project), but again, it isn't really thought through in any other way. (Also I have a hard time believing that from the way her son David talks about Kirk in the movie that he actually grew up on a Starfleet base!)

Lastly, I also found the T'Prynn/Pennington subplot a damp squib, contra my comments of fifteen years ago. Basically, Pennington and M'Benga take T'Prynn back to Vulcan. Exactly why Pennington is willing to do this is pretty vague, but mostly all the characters just do nothing while a Vulcan mystic works. T'Prynn herself is fairly absent from her own plotline.

Small niggle: while in all previous books (and future books, as far as I know), Ambassador Jetanien was a Rigellian "Chelon," in this one he suddenly becomes a "Chel" for some reason.

Precipice is the fifth Vanguard novel, and the last that I kept up with as the series was released. From this point on, all the books will be new to me. At the time I originally read it, this is what I wrote:

This novel covers almost a full year in the saga of Star Trek: Vanguard, but it feels like it artificially stretches events out in order to do that; it would have been better off with a time-frame of a couple months. I'm not a big fan of the fragmented plotlines either; hopefully the next volume sees a more central focus. It's nice to see Cervantes Quinn get some solid time, even if he did inexplicably turn from Harry Mudd into Butch Coolidge.

You can see me trying to be diplomatic there, I think. This was during my brief period as a writer of Star Trek fiction, and it didn't seem the done thing to be going around slating my fellow authors' work. (I think it was shortly after this that I stopped reviewing new Star Trek books online, actually; I only resumed doing so once it was clear to me I was not going to be writing any Star Trek books ever again.)

Star Trek: Vanguard: Precipice
by David Mack

Published: 2009
Acquired: January 2010
Previously read: March 2010
Reread: May 2026

Anyway, much like Open Secrets, I think some aspects of Precipice are dramatically inert. As I noted in my old review, the book, like Open Secrets, takes place over a whole year. This is done by having lots of things take lots of time to happen in ways I didn't find very convincing. Like, in the Pennington/T'Prynn plot, they have to hike somewhere, which takes forever, then they have to take a shuttle where they want to be, which takes forever, then they have to wait a long time for something to happen, which takes forever. Similarly, Ambassador Jetanien leaves the station to seek discussion with his Klingon and Romulan counterparts; though the Klingon turns up promptly, they wait almost all year for the Romulan. Does he really have nothing better to do? I just don't believe in it. There seem to be no internal reasons for all this, it's just so that the Vanguard series as a whole can fulfill its conceptual mandate of paralleling the original show.

Just as Open Secrets tied up the Reyes arc begun in book one, Precipice seemingly ties up the arcs for T'Prynn, Pennington, and Quinn. I found the T'Prynn arc wrapup particularly bad. First, the book's answer to the question of "why do people do terrible things in service to the security state?" is "mental illness"! The reason T'Prynn made all these awful choices in book one was because ongoing trauma from her failed mating bond and the presence of her deceased lover's katra (p. 240). It's about the least interesting answer I could have imagined. On top of that, there's this whole weird thing about how when T'Prynn is cured following the events of book four, she finds out Reyes is dead and decides to hunt down his killer. (Reyes isn't actually dead, but she doesn't know that yet.) Whose killer does she not decide to hunt down, or even think about? Her lover's! No, she's gotta deal with the death of her Man. Such a weird choice, like the author forgot the very thing that put her into a coma to begin with.

The wrapups for Pennington and Quinn are also quite bad. Pennington was introduced in book one as a good, if kind of cynical and obnoxious, journalist, but a bad person, having an extramarital affair. He's then sent to his lowest point thanks to T'Prynn's machinations; unbeknownst to him, his soon-to-be only friend, Quinn, helped her. In this book he delivers a speech explaining his personality defects that lead him to having this affair and now he's all better (pp. 238-9). It's very pat and it comes out of nowhere; how and when did he learn all this about himself? Certainly not in the intervening three books. I think you can do some interesting stuff with infidelity in fiction, but this series has not. Also, Pennington learning that his friend betrayed and lied to him also goes nowhere. Quinn's plotline here is even weirder; suddenly he has a previously unmentioned backstory as a principled mercenary and he's a badass commando operative. Like, where did this come from?

Continuity grumble: This book goes to great pains to work in the events of the 1980s novels The Vulcan Academy Murders and The IDIC Epidemic into its continuity. I don't know why, because I wouldn't have any expectation that those books were "in continuity" with these ones. But it does so in a way that makes absolutely no sense, setting them both before the television episode "Journey to Babel." But Vulcan Academy Murders is a sequel to "Journey to Babel," which entirely depends on the Enterprise characters' familiarity with Spock's parents, who they only met in "Babel." Weird choice.

Hugo Awards 2026: Ballots for Best Novella, Best Novelette, and Best Short Story

Since June, I have been writing up reviews for 2026 Hugo Award finalists that I have purchased; my usual practice is to do this for every Best Novel finalist and any finalist in other categories by authors who particularly interest me. Today, I begin posting my complete ballots with the short fiction categories: Best Novella, Novelette, and Short Story. 

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Best Novella

7. Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

The good news was that contracts were like anyone else: with a few shadowy exceptions, they wanted to survive.

This novella is about a bunch of robots in a future California that has seceded from the U.S. and given AIs citizenship, albeit with more limited rights than human beings. They end up deciding to open a noodle bar.

Many commenters have described this book as "cozy" (combine all the variants together, and it's the book's most popular tag on LibraryThing other than "science fiction," "fiction," "novella," and "2025"); others have objected that a book where the main characters all have past traumas (many of them were military robots) and are discriminated against can hardly be described as "cozy." To me, this indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of the genre of cozy fiction (as it currently exists), which I think primarily has two components. The first is that though there may be some kind of traumatic backstory, all conflicts in the present day of the story are resolved with breezy ease. Oh, are you being review bombed? Well, it was trivially easy to get the website to take them down, and besides, you don't even need that website anyway. Is it after a complete environmental disaster? Well sure but people still eat out at fancy restaurants. The second is that there must be some kind of "found family"... and because even writers trying to imagine alternatives to capitalism can't escape the constraints of our contemporary consumerist culture, the only place you can find family or gain meaning in life is in the workplace. As you might intuit from all of this commentary, this book was bad in all the ways that the current seed of the genre, Legends & Lattes, is also bad.

It's also bad in new and different ways. I acknowledge that science fiction has a long and productive history of using robots as stand-ins to metaphorically explore issues of discrimination and personhood; there are a bunch of Next Generation episodes that do this with Data, for example. Automatic Noodle is very obviously doing this—the robots are sort of trans people and immigrants. But the thing about science fiction is that it works on two levels: the metaphorical and the literal. And on the literal level, this is a book about AIs literally taking over what is a human artistic activity! Like, man, I don't need to read this in 2026. Who would ever want to? There is a subplot, as I mentioned above, about robophobia, but the robophobic people are depicted as right-wing trolls secretly funded by the capitalist U.S. government. Oh yeah, it's definitely the capitalist right wing who are worried about AI and employment. I thought this take on the dynamics of AI, artistic expression, and employment was boneheadedly dumb. I can't believe Newitz wrote it, and I can't believe Tordotcom published it. This book about AIs being trained to do human jobs literally has a note in it saying the text of the book can't be used to train AIs! The AIs of the book are, of course, nothing like contemporary LLMs... but that's the problem, it doesn't work on a literal level at all, because in the year 2026, this isn't how anyone thinks about AI. They are no longer cute friends, they're a tool of capitalists who want to extract all the value they can from human intellectual endeavor. I very much do not need to read a book that renders that into something "cute"!

6. No Award

Reader, I hated it.

5. The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar

"Ysabel," she said quietly, "do you... fancy that man?"
     She shrugged. "He's not so bad."
     "Bel, he's like a bit of bread that's been dropped in a pond!"

I barely remember what this was about even though I just read it a couple weeks ago (as of when I am writing this up). It's some kind of fairytale thing about two sisters. I don't really care about fairytale things usually (though I do remember liking El-Mohtar's "Seasons of Glass and Iron"), but at least it's not actively offensive like Automatic Noodle. (If you own the ebook edition, note that fully a third of its supposed 130 pages is really a preview for a short story collection by El-Mohtar.)

4. Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite

"There's no call to go embarrassing a fellow by telling his aunt his actual feelings."

I really wanted to like this: it's an sf murder mystery set on a generation ship where inhabitants can reload their memories from backups when they die... and even transfer between bodies. Neat premise, and the main detective seems like a fun character. Unfortunately, I found the actual mystery pretty confusing; it felt to me like Dorothy wandered around a bit and then suddenly had the whole thing solved.

3. What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher 

Ursula Vernon's third "Sword Soldier" novella (as my linked review notes) is better than the second, but not as good as the first. I don't think I would have nominated this... but even so, it has a level of fun and competence of premise that is lacking from Murder by Memory, so here it goes in the middle tier of this year's finalists.

2. The Summer War by Naomi Novik

My full review is also linked to above. Like a lot of fiction on the ballot this year (see also: The River Has Roots, Cinder House, The Everlasting), it self-consciously uses fairy tale tropes to make a broader point about the way that stories can serve as straitjackets on how we imagine ourselves as people. It's an idea I'm broadly sympathetic to and interested in, but feel like I am encountering a bit too much... which isn't really any one author's fault, but still. Given that, though, I found this an enjoyable read that I would gladly see win—clearly in a tier above Murder by Memory et al. Like Cinder House, I felt like the end of The Summer War got convoluted in its use fairy tale strictures and magic rules, and Novik is the better writer, but I found Cinder House's premise more immediately engaging, so I gave it a very slight edge here.

1. Cinder House by Freya Marske

[S]he sensed it for the first time: the downhill road between a house with a ghost and a true haunted house.
     A house was made to have people in it. It wanted them there, even if it hated them.

This was the fourth novella I read, but the first I actually enjoyed. It's a Cinderella riff, but the idea here is that when the evil stepmother kills Ella's father, Ella dies too, so she becomes a ghost haunting the house—one obligated to do work for the house's inhabitants. It makes so much sense you'd almost think it was designed that way! From that premise, the story goes off in some interesting directions, some expected (Ella gets a fairy to help her attend a ball with the prince), some less so (did not really expect a lot of what actually happened with the prince). I feel like the magic got a bit convoluted, but overall I thought this was a good story about belonging and expectations.

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Best Novelette

7. "Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy: A Murderbot Diaries Story" by Martha Wells

“My sense of security is always false.”

(Yes, that's how the title is rendered on the title page.) This story is set in the world of The Murderbot Diaries, which I assume is why it got nominated, because otherwise there is absolutely nothing interesting or noteworthy about it. It's about the crew of Perihelion going on a mission; I dimly recollected that Perihelion is the real name of "Asshole Research Transport" from the novellas. Murderbot themself is not actually in this story. The rescue mission is a side thing, though, the story is actually about Peri's crew recognizing that it's kind of crotchety and then finding out that's because it's in a new relationship. That's it, that's the story. Way too long compared to what of significance actually happens here.

 

6. No Award

 

I'm being crotchety here. Sue me. But seriously, I agree with the redditor who said of "Rapport," "I suspect everyone who nominated it of not otherwise reading short stories."

 

5. "Kaiju Agonistes" by Scott Lynch

“Comrade Minister of Medium Machine Building, if these were the bad old days, now would be the point at which I note that Siberia is lovely at this time of your life. Fortunately we have all recently stumbled into a more forgiving world.” 

This is an alternate history story about kaiju; basically, the idea seems to be "what would the political ramifications be if Godzilla was real?" But also it's supposed to be funny. I guess it is moderately so, but it goes on way too long, and the longer it goes on, the more implausible I found it. Fine, but sort of a baffling thing to consider one of the six best novelettes of the year. Still, clearly more enjoyable than "Rapport" but not trying to do anything as interesting as anything else on the ballot.

 

4. "The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For" by Cameron Reed

She really fell in love.

I don’t know why she would do something so stupid.  

This is a kind of complicated story, about a woman who was supposed to be the recipient of her mother's brain, now being raised alongside the woman who her mother will transfer her brain into instead, but then they fall in love, and then the compound they live in is attacked. I thought there was a lot going here, probably a tad too much, but it was decent.

3. "When He Calls Your Name" by Catherynne M. Valente

“Anybody in that village could’ve ended up Johnny, because everybody’s Johnny when they want more than they got. And everyone wants more than they’ve got.”

Except when she's in "twee" mode, I always enjoy how Catherynne Valente writes, and this story is no exception. It's about a woman whose husband gets involved with a seductive vampire, and the vampire comes to her house, and she has to defend this husband who had an affair against this woman who doesn't really want him for any reason other than self-interest. As she often does, Valente plunges into the depths of how humans think and their best and their worst.

2. "The Millay Illusion" by Sarah Pinsker

“Nobody is born to play a single role. Nobody is meant to do the same act forever.”

A female illusionist in an early-century travel show meets another one who yearns for bigger things, but can't obtain them because of her gender. For most of the story, I thought this was fairly middling Pinsker—magic as metaphor for our attempts to build ourselves in a hostile world, ground she's covered before in "The Court Magician" and "A Better Way of Saying"—though middling Pinsker still ranks among the best of contemporary short sf&f. But then the ending came along and she paid it all off beautifully and unsettlingly. So more than middling Pinsker for sure.

1. "Never Eaten Vegetables" by H. H. Pak

Their species has lasted for hundreds of thousands of years; surely they must have solved such conundrums from unbirth to birth.

I have never read anything by H. H. Pak before, but to me, this was the clear and obvious standout in this category, a weird but fascinating sf story about a sentient spaceship carrying a bunch of embryos to a prospective colony planet, but a malfunction causes the embryos to be born ahead of schedule, and the spaceship must care for them itself; the story alternates between these events and one of the babies, now an adult, trying to reconstruct what happened. I wasn't totally convinced by the resolution to the latter plotline, but overall, I thought this was well written, dark and plausible, with some weird but well thought through worldbuilding.

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Best Short Story

7. "Laser Eyes Ain't Everything" by Effie Seiberg

They still hadn’t built a ramp, and meetings were in-person, so I joined the union meeting by video. The HR rep made a big deal about making a “special exception” for me since I “didn’t really need this accommodation” because “someone could always carry me in like before.” I managed to keep my smile plastered on my face.

A superhero who used a wheelchair discovers that even when you are "super-abled" you can still experience ableism. I'm sure this was satisfying to write, and I'm sure everything in it accurately reflects the lived experience of people with disabilities, but what was going on was very obvious from the first page, and nothing ever complicates it, and a lot of the dialogue didn't read like real human beings.

6. "Six People to Revise You" by J. R. Dawson

“Everyone changes through life, even if they don’t have a revision.”

This has a very interesting premise, and is well told. People can undergo a process called "revision" where they are literally remade into better people—"better" here is based on collecting forms from friends, family, and acquaintances where they describe what would improve you. The story is mostly the protagonist talking to people as she collects the forms. I thought there was some really interesting stuff to explore here... but the outcome of the story is the protagonist decides not to do it because of bunch of characters we've never seen before write her notes about how she's great as she is. All the interesting questions raised are answered in the least interesting way possible. Bleh.

5. No Award

This is going to be mean, but when I read both "Laser Eyes" and "Six People," I couldn't shake the feeling that these were therapy sessions, not stories... and surely there's nothing less interesting than someone else's therapy session? Keep it to yourself, don't publish it, and certainly don't give it an award.

4. "10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days" by Samantha Mills

It’s the elderly couple from next door, Marilyn and Ted. They remember the country’s last stretch of eldritch horror, when the doomsday cultists first unmasked themselves and their century-long search for a hellgate, and they have a plan for neighborhood defense.

At the time I am writing this part of the post, this is the sixth short fiction finalist I am writing up, and the fifth published in Uncanny, and the fourth of those by someone who has previously been a Hugo finalist for short fiction. Wow, don't work too hard on casting a wide net, guys. Despite that, I enjoyed this; it's about a bunch of different timelines where the apocalypse is happening (or not). It's funny and hopeful and pessimistic all at once. The title and the first couple vignettes made me think it was going to be twee (it may have been the apocalypse, but at least we all found community!) but Mills is a better writer than that.

3. "In My Country" by Thomas Ha

The problem with ambiguity is that it demands interpretation. The demand for interpretation welcomes a different magnitude of contemplation and unanticipated dispute. 

This is a horror-tinged sf&f story about a country where art critical of the the regime is permitted... but art containing ambiguity is not. Interesting premise, very well written, very well done overall. I would gladly see it win; I gave the edge to "Missing Helen" mostly based on my overall preference for clear sf over stuff that's less clearly so. 

2. "Missing Helen" by Tia Tashiro

“We all have baggage,” I say. “I think he’s just more comfortable with mine.” 

Okay, just above this, I complained about there being too many Uncanny stories, but on the other hand, there are four Clarkesworld stories on the short fiction ballots this year... and all four are better than everything else in their categories, so there's no such thing as too many Clarkesworld stories. I enjoyed this a lot: a woman discovers that after her divorce, her ex-husband began dating her clone! Truly what I love in sf: a weird concept that works both literally and metaphorically, and strong, character-based writing.

1. "Wire Mother" by Isabel J. Kim

Like most neurodivergences, it was only diagnosed when the condition became aggravating to those around her, which, in Cassie’s case, was when she stopped listening to her mother and began saying that she wasn’t real.

This story takes place in a future where AI companionship has become ubiquitous: why marry a real woman, when you can marry an AI one who will be more obliging and never age? The protagonist is a young woman who has a neurodiverse condition that causes her to be unable to see these AIs as people—and thus she begins to despise her AI mother. Like every Isabel J. Kim story I've read, it's very well-observed, but it also makes some astute commentary on our contemporary society. I would love to teach it. As soon as I read it, it was hard for me to imagine I would read a better piece of short fiction in any Hugo category. I was right.

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Overall Thoughts

Another year, another bunch of complaints about the lack of finalist diversity. Best Novella is all but one Tor; in the other categories, it's all all Tor, Clarkesworld, and Uncanny with one exception. Though even though Clarkesworld takes up four of those twelve slots, I ranked them above any non-Clarkesworld finalists in all categories, and the one story from outside the usual suspects, I ranked below No Award! So perhaps "finalist diversity" is a red herring and the real complaint is "many Hugo nominators do not value what I value in short fiction." I am pretty bummed to once again see a shutout for Asimov's, as I think that's usually much more to my taste. I hope that Neil Clarke's Best Science Fiction of the Year anthologies get going again, so I can see what good sf I have missed from these years!

I'm not very plugged into the discourse this year, and I'm in general pretty bad at predicting winners in the short fiction categories, so I'm not going to try. (The r/Fantasy posters largely agree with me... but I don't think they are very representative!) I dread to think that Automatic Noodle will probably win, though.