Finally, here come my rankings for the "visual" Hugo categories, namely, the two Dramatic Presentation categories, and then Best Graphic Story or Comic. (Is it still called that? I feel like they changed the name.) Unlike most people I know, I am very good at keeping up with reading and very bad at keeping up with tv. So while I finished my Hugo reading three or four days before the deadline, and even had some time for non-Hugo reading throughout, I had to watch two movies and four episodes of tv during my last week, and I finished my last film at midnight the day before votes were due at noon.
(Get yourself a wife who, when you sleep until 11am, wakes you up and checks that you remembered to submit your Hugo ballot on time!)
Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)
[UNRANKED] The Wheel of Time 3x04: "The Road to the Spear", written by Rafe Lee Judkins, directed by Thomas Napper
Back in 2022, I watched a previous episode of this show when it was a finalist, and I accidentally watched the wrong one first, so I have been bored by this show twice already. I certainly wasn't about to subject myself to it a third time.
5. Murderbot 1x10: "The Perimeter", written by Paul Weitz and Chris Weitz, directed by Paul Weitz
Say what you will about The Murderbot Diaries, and I have, but the thing the books undoubtedly have going for them is the cynical narration, from a character who largely wants nothing to do with other people and their feelings. Strip that out, and you mostly get a bunch of schmaltz.
4. Murderbot 1x09: "All Systems Red", written by Paul Weitz and Chris Weitz, directed by Roseanne Liang
If an episode of a serialized show is a Hugo finalist, I typically don't watch the other episodes. You either wow me on your own, or you do not. I had a slight advantage coming into "All Systems Red," though, because I have read the first Murderbot book on which the first season is based. I thought this was decent but a bit broad; I was not very convinced by the actors playing all the humans. Some good jokes, but the occasionally sitcomesque tone was jarring.
3. Plur1bus 1x01: "We Is Us", written and directed by Vince Gilligan
This was a very well done first episode of a show with an interesting premise that I will probably never watch any more of. Works on its own in the sense that you can understand it just fine; doesn't work on its own in that it's all setting up interesting ideas, so what will be done with these interesting ideas is still to come. I thought the actress playing the main character was very good and there was some striking imagery. I wish a friend hadn't told me the premise at some point, because I think it would have been interesting to work it out while watching it. Much more involving than Murderbot.
2. Severance 2x10: "Cold Harbor", written by Dan Erickson, directed by Ben Stiller
This feels less like a nomination for this specific episode of Severance and more a nomination for the second season as a whole... and indeed, two years ago, the first season as a whole was a finalist. I don't know why that didn't happen again this year. I enjoyed the second season a lot, if not quite as much as the first—I love the premise and the leads, and there's lots of great character work and good twists, but my feeling is that some of the decisions made by the antagonists would fall apart under scrutiny. (Why can they hire whole marching bands but not, like, pay one guy to watch where Mark S. goes?) Still, I enjoyed the season finale a lot, which delves into some of the ethical implications of severance in a really interesting way... but the season ends on a cliffhanger, just like the last one did, so the pleasures of resolution are continually deferred, and that's a thing I just hate about contemporary television. Thus, even though I feel like this was probably better than Doctor Who in most senses, I am penalizing it.
(Interesting to note that three of the five tv shows are Apple ones. Are they the only interesting streaming service left at this point?)
1. Doctor Who 2x05: "The Story & the Engine", written by Inua Ellams, directed by Makalla McPherson
To me, the best episode of the second season of the largely mediocre Disney Plus Doctor Who revival was "Lux," where the Doctor and Belinda battle an evil cartoon. But this one, set almost entirely within a Nigerian barber's shop, about the power of stories, was probably second best. Not perfect, but bubbling over with ideas, and something you couldn't have done with any other Doctor. Not Doctor Who at its greatest, but largely more interesting to me than the stuff I've ranked below it.
Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)
6. Frankenstein, directed and written by Guillermo del Toro
Look, maybe this is unfair, but I have more opinions about Frankenstein than probably most anyone you know, and this adaptation has largely uninteresting takes on a novel that I find intensely interesting. I was not a fan of reducing it all to Freudian family melodrama, especially its very unearned ending. I liked the earlier parts of the film better; the introduction of (essentially) Victorian Elon Musk was an interesting idea (though it doesn't really go anywhere in the end), and the bit where jaunty exciting music played while Victor was cutting up corpses was probably the best part of the entire film. If it had all been that clever and that striking, I would have ranked it much higher. Too many fight scenes; the gruesome violence of those got old fast.
(I could be wrong, but I think this is the first Frankenstein movie I have ever seen! Seems weird that that could be true after forty years, but I am pretty sure it is.)
5. KPop Demon Hunters; directed by Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans; written by Danya Jimenez, Hannah McMechan, Maggie Kang, and Chris Appelhans
This movie has been watched in my household many times since it came out last summer, and the music has been played many times more. I am very familiar with all the music videos. But I had actually never seen the movie all the way through until I was forced to when it was announced as a Hugo finalist. It was cute enough. Not deep, but I did really like "What It Sounds Like," which I think is beautiful stuff. If it had only all been that good!
4. Sinners, directed and written by Ryan Coogler
I thought this was a well done vampire story with good period details. Surprisingly funny, which I had not expected from the somewhat earnest discourse around it. ("Maybe she ain't white" made me rewind to make sure I heard it right!) Some great moments overall, just not totally my kind of thing, so not as interesting to me as Andor but certainly more interesting than Demon Hunters. Anyway, anything from this point up strikes me as a totally worthy winner.
3. Andor Season Two, created by Tony Gilroy
In 2023, two episodes of Andor season one were finalists in Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form), which didn't really work, as Andor is one of those shows where the whole season is one big story. Thankfully, this year, the entire season was a finalist in Long Form. I know everyone loves Andor, but having seen a whole season of it now, I find it a very frustrating show. I think it's very well shot, it has lots of great, interesting characters (bar, weirdly, Andor himself), and every now and again there's a beautiful moment that just hits it out of the park: Mon Mothma dancing at her daughter's funeral, Mon Mothma's speech, the Ghorman massacre, Kleya Marki's infiltration of the hospital. But this series is structured as four three-episode stories, and it was hard for me to shake the feeling that every single one of these could have been cut down to two episodes and the show wouldn't have lost a thing. Its cardinal sin is that too often it's just boring! So I am ranking it above KPop Demon Hunters (clearly it is doing interesting things) but below Superman (which was never boring).
2. Superman, directed and written by James Gunn
I wanted to see this last summer (it came out on my birthday, even!), but didn't mange to get around to it. Now, having finally seen it, I would say it's good but not great. Clearly conceived as an anti–Man of Steel (every time the film shows massive devastation, it carefully demonstrates both that the area has been evacuated and that Superman scoops up innocent bystanders), it leans into a lot of stuff I like about the character, and obviously was made by someone who—like me—thinks of the Donner movies and the comics of the 1980s and '90s as the "default" version of the DC universe. Given I recently reread all the JLI comics, I of course appreciated the Guy Gardner stuff, though I wish Metamorpho's personality was more like that iteration; as someone from Cincinnati, I of course appreciated the Hall of Justice. But I feel like it never quite grabbed me; I found the emotional conflict supposedly at the heart of the film kind of distant and unclear. But anyway, obviously more to my taste than Andor, but not as interesting to me as Mickey 17.
1. Mickey 17, directed and written by Bong Joon Ho
This movie is about a guy who can't die—or rather, can die as many times as his masters need him to do so—sent into space as expendable support on a colonization mission. The boss of the mission is a sort of combined Donald Trump/Elon Musk figure; the movie as a whole uses these ideas of immortality to think about who we consider expendable in lots of different concepts, but especially imperialism and capitalism. Lots of weird tonal shifts, which I always like, and good, if dark, jokes.
This is a webcomic that has been running since 2006; its third act concluded in 2025. (It's apparently not concluded yet, but the author's blog indicates Act 4 won't begin for a couple years.) Under the way the Hugo Awards handle serial narratives, that means the entire comic is eligible for the Hugo Awards as a unit. However, only the 2025 strips, which run sixty pages, are included in the Hugo voter packet. On the other hand, reading the comic since the beginning would mean reading over two thousand strips... and the art started out quite terrible! So I decided to read the comic from the beginning of Act 3, which started in 2020, and is a more manageable 469 pages, though I did skim some of the very early strips for context.
Anyway, that means it's not totally the comic's fault I was often lost, but there are a lot of characters with a lot of history to keep track of here. That I didn't mind too much... what I did mind is that the actual stakes of the act where amorphous and unclear. I don't know if that would have been better if I'd read the whole thing or what; there's apparently a big time gap between acts 2 and 3, and from context, I think a lot of what confused me was new to Act 3. The basic thing here is that 1) ghosts are real, 2) seeing them has something to do with a brain chip (but I wasn't sure what; I think the chip lets you see ghosts but I also think there were unchipped characters who could see ghosts?), 3) the government is going to give everyone brain chips in order to connect minds to create collective empathy (the two leads are the president and first lady), 4) but this means everyone will also know about ghosts, causing a national freakout, so 5) they must figure out how to get the one without the other, and 6) contend with the Catholic Church, which has its own opinions on what people know about the afterlife. What I didn't get is why the president and first lady were so keen to give everyone brain chips. If they couldn't figure out a way to give people collective empathy without giving everyone ghost knowledge, then why not... just hold off? All the characters acted like there was a deadline of when the "Middle Bridge Project" was due to launch, but surely the launch date was chosen by the characters? It was also very unclear to me what the Catholic Church was actually trying to do. Like, they wanted to be in on it in some way... but what were they actually trying to do and how was it bad? I never really knew.
So with the stakes so unclear, I was pretty much doomed to not enjoy this.
Back in the 2000s, I was a voracious consumer of webcomics, and this struck me as "quirky" in a way very much typical of the era. It would have fit very well among the kind of stuff I read back then! It reads like a weird throwback in the 2020s, however.
(The good thing that came out of me reading this is that it spurred me to get the same creators' graphic novel Sidequested out of the library for my seven-year-old, and they loved it so much they read it three times in one week and then asked me to read it too.)
5. The Power Fantasy, Volume One: The Superpowers, script by Kieron Gillen, art by Caspar Wijngaard
Kieron Gillen is one of those writers who gets on the ballot no matter what he writes at this point: since I started voting in the Hugo Awards, he has been a finalist every year since 2020 except for 2024. Gillen is a good writer... but surely not that good. The Power Fantasy is a case in point. I like to flippantly refer to him as "a poor man's Brian K. Vaughan," but Power Fantasy is actually a poor man's Alan Moore or Warren Ellis: in its depiction "what would it really be like for there to be people with superpowers on Earth?", it seems to do little we didn't see already in Miracleman or The Authority. (The super-fetus is very clearly Miracleman-derived!) It even seems to be derivative of Gillen's own work; the squabbling group of superpowered humans with complex histories is right out of The Wicked + The Divine. Of course, one of the most obnoxious things a critic can do is write something off by telling you it's like some other thing they've already read... but I found this offered little original within the medium or genre, and it definitely felt like one of those things that thinks it's being original.
But at least I (mostly) understood what was going on, so I ranked it above A Girl and Her Fed. Hopefully this series doesn't become a perennial finalist in this category like Gillen's Once & Future was.
4. The Space Cat, script by Nnedi Okorafor, art by Tana Ford
As I said in my full review, I thought this was fun but slight. I don't know that it feels particularly award-worthy... but at least it wasn't derivative, so I ranked it above The Power Fantasy.
As noted in my full review linked above, I found this solid, well-done superhero comics... but nothing transcendent despite some of the hype it has received. Similarly, I thought Space Cat was a solid, well-done example of its genre. So they pretty much rank equally to me; I broke the tie because I'm just more into the genre that Absolute Wonder Woman belongs to than I am the genre that Space Cat belongs to.
2. A Wizard of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel: Book One of Earthsea by Fred Fordham
In the oddball Hugo category that is "Best Graphic Story," one common type of finalist over the last five years is the graphic novel adaptation of an acclaimed prose work: see 2021's Parable of the Sower (which won) or 2023's Dune (though that's technically the comic of the movie of the book!) or 2024's The Three-Body Problem. I feel like the appearance of these kinds of finalists on the ballot say more about 1) the original prose work, and 2) the limited graphic novel reading of the Hugo electorate than anything else. That said, Fred Fordham's adaptation of the first Earthsea novel is clearly the best of these adaptations to ever appear on the ballot. Fordham's art is beautiful, and overall, this reads as a comic in a way that, say, Parable of the Sower did not, with the images doing the storytelling and very effective use of panelling in the storytelling. The magic still manages to feel magical, even though it's been moved out of Le Guin's beautiful prose into (arguably) the more straightforward visual medium. I did think some episodes became a little too abbreviated to follow, but overall this was very effective. (It's not totally fair to the book, though, but I do think my reading experience was diminished by the PDF provided in the voter packet rendering each two-page spread as a single page, which made the pages kind of small when read on my tablet.)
If you read my review linked above, you will see that I was highly skeptical about 1) a picture book being a finalist in this category, which has up to now entirely been comics (despite picture books technically qualifying), and 2) it being a picture book not created by people who normally do picture books (if you are a parent, you will know there is normally nothing worse). But this turned out not only to be pretty good, but to be the strongest finalist this year! I don't know that I would have thought so in a different year (I would have ranked it third in 2025 or 2024, for example), but this year the category was weak, and I think Invisible Parade clearly had the best storytelling of everything I read from a graphic standpoint: not in the quality of the images qua images, but in the way the images tell the story from page to page.
Overall Thoughts
I think that serialized streaming shows continue to be a point of difficulty for the Hugo Awards. Normally I'm loathe to propose adding categories, but I think Dramatic Presentation should be rejigged into three . I don't know what to call them, but duration-wise, they would be something like:
<60 mins.: for single episodes of tv shows (or other short things; like Dirty Computer from a few years ago); hopefully the nominators would concentrate on things that actually do work on their own
60-180 mins.: for films
>180 mins.: for entire seasons of streaming television programs; hopefully the nominators would concentrate on things that need their entireties to work, like Andor, Murderbot, and Severance
Right now, it's dumb that I have to judge "Cold Harbor" on its own when it clearly doesn't work on its own, but it's equally dumb that I'm comparing twelve hours of Andor to two hours of Mickey 17.
Overall, I thought both Dramatic Presentation categories just fine. I didn't love most of Short Form, but I appreciate that much of it is widely loved, so the category is presumably doing what it's meant to; as always, I am grateful to Long Form for introducing me to a couple interesting movies I probably never would have gotten around to otherwise (this year: Sinners and Mickey 17).
Best Graphic Story is the usual hodgepodge this year, but to be honest, it's probably been worse. A Girl and Her Fed was pretty bleh, but even that, I can appreciate the scale of the achievement. I suspect this category is still not really finding and rewarding the best of sf&f comics, but I also suspect it never will.
The Hugo category "Best Graphic Story" is typically based around comic books, comic strips, and graphic novels, but the category parameters are actually written more expansively than that. I think the only finalist to not be a comic, however, was the xkcd installment "Time," and that's kind of arguable.
The Invisible Parade by Leigh Bardugo and John Picacio
One of this year's finalists, though, is clearly not a comic: The Invisible Parade is a children's picture book. I was a bit skeptical about this when I saw it, especially when I saw that the book was illustrated by John Picacio and written by Leigh Bardugo. Now don't get me wrong, Picacio is a great illustrator, but he's won a Hugo three times and been a finalist thirteen times beyond that, usually in Best Professional Illustrator, for his covers. Anyone who follows the Best Graphic Story category will know that a lot of its finalists are usually mediocre comics by people who have been finalists in the non-comics Hugo categories, like Seanan McGuire and Nnedi Okorafor. And while Leigh Bardugo has never been a Hugo finalist before, she is a first-time children's book author, much better known for her romantasy novels. Reading children's books aloud to my kids for the last eight years has definitely made me into a children's book snob; I very much agree with Mac Barnett that "more like 94.7 percent of kids’ books are crud," and a big reason for this is the intrusion of people of who are not normally children's books authors. Why The Invisible Parade and not, say, Jessie Sima's latest? (I would rank Not Quite Narwhal above at least a couple of the 2018 finalists.)
I normally don't buy finalists outside of the Best Novel category unless they're by an author I really care about... but Leigh Bardugo is an author my wife really cares about (her favorite romantasy writer) and she asked me to buy this, so I did.
Anyway, all of this is to say that I went into The Invisible Parade with a fair bit of skepticism... but I actually ended up enjoying it quite a bit. The book is about a young girl on the Day of the Dead, who is having trouble getting into the celebrations because she's still upset over the recent death of her grandfather. When she enters the cemetery, she gets separated from her family and encounters the four horsemen. The actual sentence-level writing is so-so, I found it stronger when reading it in my head than when I read it aloud to my kids; I think you can tell Bardugo isn't a natural at fitting into this kind of confined space, but the story itself is pretty good, though I found one aspect of the "moral" kind of weird.
However, the book really shines in the art. Obviously Picacio is a great book cover illustrator... but that doesn't necessarily make him a great graphic story illustrator, but thankfully he is. Good sense of how to pace images, especially good page-turn reveals, which I think are essential to picture book illustrating; sometimes here you turn a page and what you see is just glorious. The text is fine, but it's really the images that tell the story. I don't know if this will be a favorite of my kids (aged five and seven), though they did find it interesting, but I thought it was very well put together from a visual standpoint.
Mike Barr's "fair-play whodunit" comic series The Maze Agency (see my two posts linked below for more detail on its original run) has been revived several times since the end of its original run in 1991. The first of these revivals was a three-issue black-and-white miniseries from indie publisher Caliber Comics in the late 1990s. Picking up the first two of these isn't that hard, but the third issue often goes for silly money on the secondary market—I think because Adam Hughes drew one its two covers, though even the cover he didn't draw can still go for a lot for some reason. (Automated bot pricing?) Thankfully MyComicShop posted a $3 copy of the non-Hughes cover while I was engaged in some futile eBay bidding. (Like, it wasn't there when I started looking for it, hence me going to eBay to begin with, but then I went back a few days later and it was!)
The Caliber run consists of three done-in-one murder mysteries, of course: in #1, Jen and Gabe investigate the death of the actress who played Justice Girl decades ago in a film; in #2, they travel to a Catholic monastery to locate a vital witness for a mob case, and in #3, they are confounded when three different women all turn up claiming to be a model who hasn't been seen in public for decades. They are all solid mysteries of the type Barr perfected in the original Maze Agency run, though I found all the characters and clues in #3 (each potential model also has associated side characters) hard to keep track of. On the other hand, I liked #2 a lot; a large cast of suspects, but they are distinctive, so you can keep track of them all fairly easily, and some nice twists.
from The Maze Agency vol. 2 #2
I'm assuming running the series in black and white was a cost-cutting decision, not an artistic one. Certainly, issues #1 and 3 seem to have been drawn much as anyone would draw a color comic. However, issue #2 feels like it was designed to run in black and white: lots of shadows in the monastery, lots of dark brickwork. Overall, I found it moody and effective. If someone (hypothetically) created a Maze Agency Omnibus, I'd probably want to see issues #1 and 3 colored, but I think coloring #2 would diminish its effect.
Overall, Gene Gonzales is an effective penciller, capturing the likenesses of our leads; he does the first two issues and the first half of the third. Unfortunately, the second half of #3 is done by a different artist with a style that seems both rushed and inappropriately cartoony... and having your characters change physical appearance halfway through an issue is especially detrimental to a murder mystery!
Volume 2 of The Maze Agency originally appeared in three issues, from July 1997 to Apr. 1998.* The stories were written by Mike W. Barr; pencilled by Gene Gonzales (#1-3) and James Bible (#3); inked by David Rowe (#1), Ande Parks (#2), Jason Baumgartner (#2-3), and Larry Shuput (#3); and edited by Joe Pruett (#1-3) and James Pruett (#3).
This is the antepenultimate in a series of posts about Mike W. Barr's The Maze Agency. The next covers volumes 3 and 4 from IDW and Scout. Previous installments are listed below:
* The indicia dates on issues #2 and 3 are both just "1998," no month given. Some Internet sources give the months as Jan. and Feb. 1998, respectively, but I think this is just arbitrarily placing the issues in the two earliest slots in 1998. John Jackson Miller's Comichron includes issues #2 and 3 on his sales charts for Feb. and Apr. 1998, and given that issue #1 appears on the sales chart for July 1997, we can infer that Caliber was one of those publishers where the indicia date matches the sales month.
I'm not jumping between different volumes of the Til All Are One compendia anymore, but as always I have my own opinion about how to sequence the stories. (Though I should note I find all of Skybound's decisions here perfectly rational.) My first change is that the compendium places the Action Force crossover Ancient Relics! between "Crater Critters" (UK #123-4) and "The Cure!" (#126-7), which is where part one was released. (Parts two through five didn't appear in The Transformers, but in the UK Action Force comic.) But even though Ancient Relics! doesn't connect to it and so certainly could be taking place simultaneously, "Crater Critters"/"The Cure!" is a single two-part story and it reads weird to have this whole other story in the middle of it, so I bumped it to after "The Cure!"
On the other hand, the compendium places all four parts of the Headmasters miniseries after US #37, which makes sense, as the Earth Autobots send a signal in US #37 that is picked up by the Headmasters in Headmasters #4. But Headmasters was released bi-monthly across late 1987, and I decided I wanted my experience to replicate that—sort of like every now and then you cut to what's going on in space. Headmasters #1 came out between "Crater Critters" and "The Cure!", so I read it after "The Cure!" This does mean my installments of Headmasters will be spread out across several weeks' worth of posts.
Fire on High! / "Vicious Circle!" / "Mechanical Difficulties!" / "Crater Critters" / "The Cure!" / "Ring of Hate!" / Ancient Relics!, from The Transformers US #28-30 (May-July 1987) & The Transformers: Headmasters #1 (July 1987) / The Transformers UK #119-27 & 130-3 (27 June–22 Aug. & 12 Sept.–3 Oct. 1987), The Transformers Annual [1987], and Action Force #24-27 (15 Aug.–5 Sept. 1987); reprinted in The Transformers: Til All Are One Compendium Two (2025)
written by Simon Furman and Bob Budiansky; pencils by Dan Reed, Geoff Senior, Anderson, Don Perlin, and Frank Springer; inks by Dan Reed, Geoff Senior, Dave Harwood, and Ian Akin & Brian Garvey; letters by Mike Scott, Starkings, Janice Chiang, Diana Albers, and Annie Halfacree; colour by Steve White and Nel Yomtov
from The Transformers UK #120
Fire on High! and "Vicious Circle!" wrap up the ongoing story about Galvatron, Rodimus, Ultra Magnus, Goldbug, and Death's Head. It's totally fine—nothing too clever, but I did enjoy, of course, getting to see a Galvatron/Ultra Magnus throwdown once again drawn by Geoff Senior. It's too bad he didn't get to draw the story's final installment too!
From there, we go into a run of US stories detailing how Grimlock's leadership is shaking out, and focusing a bit on new-ish Autobots like Blaster and Goldbug. The first of these, "Mechanical Difficulties!", inexplicably brings back "the Mechanic," the human villain from just a couple issues ago who made off with some of the Autobots' equipment... when they were all being very dumb. This guy did not need to come back; this story about him is also not very good either. Things improve with "Crater Critters" and "The Cure!", a two-part story where Goldbug and Blaster—having gone rogue due to their dislike of Grimlock's leadership—discover some Decepticons newly arrived on Earth bring with them an infection of metal-eating "scraplets." Some decent character dynamics... plus I always love any Transformers story featuring my favorite Decepticon fuel auditor, Ratbat!
from The Transformers: Headmasters #1
Then I jumped to the first issue of Headmasters. As noted above, I'm reading this (roughly) in publication sequence. But also, the IDW reprints of the Marvel US comic (inexplicably) placed this in the final volume... which I never got, so I've never actually read this story before. I found it interesting and kind of odd. I like the idea of a bunch of Autobots growing weary of war and deciding to leave Cybertron, though it seems a bit mean of them to go to an inhabited planet and potentially bring the war there! Like a lot of Transformers stories of this era, it suffers from needing to introduce lots of toys and thus lots of characters, no one's personality really pops. The present-day versions of a lot of characters introduced in the movie appear here for the first time: Kup, Hot Rod, Blurr. This answers my question from last post of "Kup is always portrayed as one of the longest-serving Autobots... yet
whenever 2007 Kup travels back in time to 1987, none of the 1987
Autobots know who he is. So where did he serve and who with?" But on the other hand, I feel like Uncle Bob is barely trying when it comes to conveying personality: Kup, Hot Rod, and Blurr all have very distinctive even if simple personalities, and you get absolutely no hint of them here! They're just generic Autobot filler.
from Action Force #24
Lastly, we get Ancient Relics! Since G.I.Joe and the Transformers (see items #10 and 11 in the list below) couldn't be run in the UK, this was its equivalent there, with the UK's G.I.Joe adaptation, Action Force. (Though, this reprinting changes all instances of "Action Force" to "G.I.Joe." I am not sure if that was done for this volume or some previous reprint.) The first part ran in the Transformers comic and the other four in Action Force, I'm guessing to convince loyal TF readers to check out the other mag.
I really don't care about G.I.Joe, but I found this pretty enjoyable. Trying to find the missing Goldbug and Blaster, Blades instead finds Megatron—damaged and deranged after blowing himself up on the space bridge (see #10 below)—in the sewers of London. Blades, Grimlock, and Centurion must try to bring him down with the help of G.I.Joe, who are totally outclassed. It's a pretty simple story, elevated like a lot of Simon Furman's work by using punchy first-person narration from a variety of different characters. And, of course, five whole installments of Geoff Senior art! (But who else could ever be given the assignment of drawing Megatron vs. Grimlock?) One problem: in previous stories, Centurion was a human-built robot remote-controlled by a human being, but here is clearly a reasoning being on his own! Whoops.
This is the twelfth in a series of posts about Marvel's The Transformers. The next covers US issues #31-32 and UK issues #128-9 & 132-7. Previous installments are listed below:
In chronological order, this is the second volume of the Penguin History of Britain, covering the period from the Roman withdrawal to the Norman Conquest. The predecessor to this series, the Pelican History of England, positioned itself as "social histories," eschewing kings and battles and dates in favor of giving the reader a sense of how society itself changed over time. Or, at least, that was the theory; I think many of the writers struggled with the concept in practice, and I certainly did as a reader. Often it felt like you weren't really getting a story, but instead a snapshot, if you see the distinction. For example, though I did like that series's volume 2, it didn't really capture how England evolved from the Roman withdrawal to the Norman Conquest, it just told you what it was like overall. Some writers did quite badly with this approach, though others made it work quite well.
I am not sure if the Penguin History of Britain shared this aspect of the premise of the Pelican History of England or not; the "inviolable rules" from the series editor that author Robin Fleming mentions in her introduction are just 1) no footnotes, 2) no historiography, and 3) keep it accessible (xxii). But even if not, it did seem to me that in this volume, Fleming was attempting to write a social history, be it an editorial mandate or not, along the lines of her predecessors: "the founding contention of this book is that the aggregate of the actions, beliefs and tribulations of whole generations of individuals shaped lives and changed societies in very profound ways...; indeed, they did so more fundamentally than the actions of people whose names we happen to know" (xx). Later, she points out that naturally later writers would have fallen into this trap, "because high politics consumed men writing in the late tenth and eleventh centuries, and naturally modern historians have come to share the concerns of our writers of texts" (314).
As I said, the mixed results of the Pelican History suggests that this can be a tricky thing to accomplish. Even though I enjoyed its volume 2, it didn't really tell a story; some of the series's more successful volumes seemed to accomplish the goal of telling a story mostly by abandoning the goal of sticking to society itself. So, I had little evidence you could cover society and tell a good story!
Britain after Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400–1070 by Robin Fleming
Well, Fleming gives me some very strong evidence, because I found that Britain after Rome succeeded at exactly what it set out to accomplish. There is indeed little of (what in his introduction to volume 4 of the Pelican Histories, A. R. Myers called) "dates and kings and battles." But that doesn't mean Fleming fails to tell a story; she does an excellent job of giving you a sense of how Britain changed over this period.
Her major thesis seems to be that while we think of the Angles and Saxons as invading and conquering Britain during this time period, there's little evidence of that from the actual period in question, and much more evidence that they settled in Britain and were gradually integrated culturally and societally. Like Dorothy Whitelock in the Pelican History's volume 2, Fleming is interested in the economic power of kings, but unlike Whitelock, she gives you a sense of how that power evolved over time: "Although it is clear that kings were not the founders of England's early towns, it is nonetheless certain that the fates of towns and kings were inextricably linked, because, although kings had not made towns, towns... were beginning to remake England's more formidable kings" (205). She goes on to describe how kings came to realize you could get much more from controlling and taxing town economies than you ever could from warfare (212).
Fleming uses archaeological evidence to push against the political tendencies of earlier writers, but unlike the first volumes of either the Pelican History or the Penguin one,
she is able to use this evidence to tell a story, so it does not feel
like you are just getting a succession of descriptions of places: "It is only when we look at the statistics provided by the bones of the early medieval dead that we come face to face with just how dire life in this period was; how sick, how sad and how short.... Narrative sources... do not allow us to see the leg ulcers that plagued so many; the swarms of disease-carrying flies; the constant discomfort caused by a gut full of parasites; the scrawny, undersized 14-year-old boys. Yet these were fundamental, bodily aspects of people's lives in early medieval Britain" (365). It's very well done stuff, and overall, I found this highly enjoyable reading.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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 Ponyand 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!
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.)
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:
"[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.
I think most of these are bad:
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
6. A Girl and Her Fed, scripts by K. B. Spangler, art by Ale Presser
4. The Space Cat, script by Nnedi Okorafor, art by Tana Ford
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