Hugo Awards 2026 Chat

Here at The Frumious Consortium, we are always excited to scrutinize the list of Hugo Finalists!

Doug: I’ve read one of the Best Novel finalists! And one in Novella! And I think I tried to read one in Best Short Story. I’ve forgotten whether I bounced or just suffered tab overload and closed that one out. Yay! Inventing the Renaissance made it in Best Related Work! My copy of that has so many Post-It flags. I had intended to write a multi-part thingie for Frumious; maybe I will revisit as part of Hugo season.

Ooh, Sinners did make the list in Best Dramatic Presentation, but that’s a tough, tough field this year. The notes for the category say that the top choice got 313 nominations out of 650 ballots cast. Anyone want to hazard a guess which one that was?

And a third Murderbot episode would have been a finalist in Short Form of Dramatic Presentation, but for the limit of two episodes per show. I’m so glad the years when this category was Best Episode of Doctor Who have passed.

Emily: I’m surprised that I haven’t read any of the short stories this year!

Doug: Three finalists from Clarkesworld and two from Uncanny, but I don’t keep up with either.

Emily: Same.

Doug: Not out of animus or anything, it’s just there’s a lot of internet to read.

Emily: I’ve read three of the novels, am partway through two, and I have Shroud but haven’t read it yet.

Doug: That’s a great start on the novels!

Emily: I’ve read three of the novellas and two of the novelettes. I like Sarah Pinsker; I’ll seek that one out, too.

Doug: I think Doreen has even reviewed A Drop of Corruption [Note: She has!]. The novella I have already read is What Stalks the Deep. Part of 2026’s Kingfisher-of-the-Month theme.

Doreen: I think I nominated A Drop Of Corruption, because I was reading it when The Tainted Cup won last year. It’s even better than the first book in the series, imo!

I have almost never read any of the short stories/novelettes/poetry beforehand. I wish I could but that’s like the main reason I’m a voter, so they can tell me what’s good to read.

I’m surprised I’ve already seen three of the long form nominees. I probably preferred Sinners to KPDH and Mickey 17, in that order. I haven’t watched any of Andor yet but should probably fix that soon.

Emily: I’ve seen all of the long form noms except Mickey 17. Andor is excellent!

Wow, I haven’t read ANY of the Lodestar noms! I have Among Ghosts though and it’s up next for me after I finish reading Wizards Abroad in my “only be reading one YA book at a time” slot.

Doreen: Mickey 17 is pretty good for what it is. I have to admit to finding Robert Pattinson’s accent very distracting at the beginning.

Doug: I DNF’d the Mickey 7 book and wasn’t even aware that there had been a movie. But I saw Superman on the big screen! That was a lot of fun. I don’t know if KPDH got a cinematic release here in Germany, but if it did I missed it.

[Note: time passes.]

Emily: Since we started chatting about this I have finished The Everlasting (as an audiobook) and read Among Ghosts. I liked both a lot! It’s honestly weird to me that I haven’t read more of the Lodestar noms, too, since I generally think of myself as a YA Person.

And I’d been hearing great things about Alix Harrow for a long time and one of the audiobook readers for The Everlasting is Moira Quirk, which is a definite selling point for me. It was a really engaging listen.

Now I’m back to actively reading The Death of the Author, which I have as a physical book. It does stuff with fonts? So I want to keep reading it physically even though it’s just not as convenient and portable as an ebook would be. I bought it in March at a very cool book shop in Pittsburgh called City of Asylum Books, and started reading it immediately. Even though I was super into it, I set it aside because: physical book. Now I’m excited to be back into it!

Controversy Enters the Chat!

Doreen: So, friends, there was a bit of controversy online over whether Hugo voters actually read all the nominees. I will freely admit that I don’t, but I also don’t vote in the categories I don’t read and/or experience! I’ve skipped voting in the Video Games category multiple years simply because I haven’t experienced any of them. I do however admit to voting in categories where I haven’t read ALL the nominees yet, and vote based only on the ones I have read. What are your thoughts?

Doug: I like the Hugo voting community’s passion for fairness that make this a lively question! Can you give all the works a fair shake if you haven’t read everything in a category? Well, I’ll say up front that I don’t read everything, and I have to trust the community to balance out the idiosyncrasies and eccentricities in people’s voting. I mean, setting aside the six stories that are short, we’re talking about six novelettes, six novellas, possibly eighteen novels (including the Lodestar and Astounding not-a-Hugos), up to six more books in Related Work, plus whatever amounts of the magazines and fan writings that might add up to “all” in those categories. And then there’s Best Series. [Note: Best Series has 40 books this year.] That’s a lot of reading!

I have to trust the community to balance out the idiosyncrasies and eccentricities in people’s voting.

Before I go on, I want to pause for a moment to reiterate what a great thing the Hugo reader’s packet is. Even though I am sometimes mildly cranky about including only partial works, it is a great aid to voting, and it makes the award so much stronger. A case in point is Ryka Aoki’s Light From Uncommon Stars, my favorite book from 2022. It was, if I recall correctly, sixth in the nominations, just barely on the list of finalists. I doubt that I would have ever heard of the book, had it not been a Hugo finalist. And if you look at the way the voting went, after every round, the book picked up more and more votes. This wonderful book that barely made the shortlist wound up placing second. That means that Hugo voters actually read the book, and I think that’s entirely due to the reader’s packet.

I tend to concentrate my reading on the four classic fiction categories, and there I do genuinely try to read all of them. Sometimes I bounce—the third part of The Three-Body Problem trilogy did not grab me at all—and that gets reflected in my voting. Only having an excerpt in these categories does make me think less of a work. I suppose an excerpt could get my top vote, but I don’t think it’s happened yet.

In the rest of the categories, I tend to read until I think I’ve gotten a sense of how the work compares with the others. Last year, for example, I didn’t read all of A City on Mars before I voted, because I had a pretty clear idea that was the best work in that category. As it happens, I later went back and not only read the whole book, I bought a hardback copy. The reader’s pack does sell books! This year, I’m glad that I have already read Inventing the Renaissance, because it’s terrific but it’s also long. If I were just now coming to the book, I doubt that I would read the whole thing before voting because its quality is apparent all the way through.

The reader’s pack does sell books!

I haven’t made room in my life for podcasts, so I don’t vote in that category. More or less the same for game or interactive work. I did vote for Animal Crossing the year it was a finalist because I saw how enthralled some people in my household were with that game. Beyond that, I vote based on what’s in the reader’s packet, unless somehow I have already experienced additional bits of a finalist’s work. And there it’s a comparative exercise: I’m not reviewing all that a finalist has done, I’m ranking them based on what they’ve chosen to show as a sample of their work.

Sometimes there are corner cases. Last year, I didn’t watch the videos that were nominated in Best Related Work; this year has one episode from a podcast. There’s also a spreadsheet, which I will probably look at and consider from a “contribution to the community” point of view, but honestly don’t expect to rank very high. It’s a very insider-y nomination. (Though it’s better than nominating a convention, which I rank low on principle.)

Best Series is tricky, because there is no way that I am going to read all of those books in time. On the other hand, series are important to the field, and I’m glad there’s a way to recognize these larger works as a whole and not just the constituent parts. That’s the category that’s most likely to get vibes-based votes from me, and if that’s unfair I just have to hope that the rest of the community makes up for it.

Doreen: I am very much in agreement with you regarding voting, and ESPECIALLY the importance of the Reader’s Packet. Light From Uncommon Stars was an extraordinary book that I probably wouldn’t have found the time for had it not been in my packet. It’s somewhat rare for both of us to rave over the same book—especially one that isn’t considered “established”—so I 100% agree with you on the packet being an invaluable part of the Hugo voting experience.

This year, I’m planning on reading all the Short Stories, Poems, Novelettes, Graphic Stories and Novellas. Hopefully, I will also have time for the Novels (insert crying emoji here.) I’ve already gotten a head start on the Podcasts: I don’t think I voted for any in 2025, but I definitely did in the last year that Annalee Newitz & Charlie Jane Anders’ Our Opinions Are Correct won, before they withdrew themselves from competition. Either that or I did vote but the results haven’t stuck with me, lol. I’m also planning on voting for Artists and whichever other categories I feel I’ve had enough exposure to via the packet or otherwise. So I won’t be voting for any Video Games this year, and I’ll probably be giving the Related Works category a miss. I’m glad you’ll be voting in that last tho!

Oh, and I do hope to give the Lodestar and Dell Awards a shot but they are lower on my list of priorities. Like Emily, I really enjoy reading YA novels, and was surprised not to have read any of the Lodestar nominees this year. The only one I’m remotely familiar with is Tracy Deonn’s Oathborn, and that’s the 600+ page third entry in a trilogy, which is truly a hard ask given my work schedule. No, wait, there’s also the latest Suzanne Collins book, which I will read despite my difficulty in engaging with The Hunger Games media property since stupid people have done their best to ruin an anti-war, anti-capitalism series by insisting that it’s exactly the opposite. Also, Rue is Black! She’s always been Black! How are so many people so bad at reading?!

Emily: Truly an outlier year for the Lodestar noms! I am not a Hugo voter so I am interested but not contributing to this part of the conversation.

Doreen: Honestly, the packet alone is worth the relatively low price of entry, plus how fun it feels to tell people I’m a Hugo voter, lol.

Oh, and I will definitely decline to vote in Best Series this year. I haven’t read any of the books from ANY of those series, alas! I will also skip the Short Form Dramatic Presentations because I rarely watch TV, tho will try to catch up with Andor for Long Form (and still need to watch Superman and Frankenstein)

Doug: I’ll try to see more in Best Dramatic Presentation (Long) since I’ve already seen two. I don’t catch a lot of TV, though I did watch Murderbot with my eldest, which was a good time. (And the new Murderbot book is terrific!) So I won’t have much to add in Best Dramatic (Short). For weird geographic and construction reasons, we don’t have very good internet via cable or cellular, and sometimes the large files in Best Graphic Work have been too much trouble to download.

For Best Series, I’ve already read almost all of both the Scalzi and the Addison, so I’ll be ranking those two at least. I’ve been on the Goblin Emperor bandwagon for more than 10 years now, so I’m really happy to see the series get some Hugo love. I’ll have to see what else the reader packet might offer in this category. I’m bummed that the Singing Hills Cycle (Nghi Vo) isn’t long enough to be eligible for Best Series. I hope there is more to come!

Emily: Hoping there is more to come seems totally on theme for the Best Series award! I look forward to learning the winners at the end of August.

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Note: This conversation has been edited slightly for clarity.