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.
Best Novel
4. The Raven Scholar by Antonia HodgsonI 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. HarrowAs 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.)
Best Related Work
7. History of Westeros: "Ragnarök vs. The Long Night" by Aziz and Ashaya
4. Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer- "[I]t is peppered with direct genre references."
- 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.
- Palmer's narrative techniques are taken from sf.
- Surely the bar for "related work" must be higher than this.
- 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.
- 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.
1. Last War in Albion: The Cuddled Little Vice (Sandman) by Elizabeth Sandifer Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book
5. Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe by C. B. LeeI 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.
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!
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 TranLike 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.
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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