5 ms·
2026 Hugo Awards
- bbor 1mo agoSinners was a scifi movie...? About vampires in the past...?! Wild. Ditto for Claire Oscura: Expedition 33, which I thought was high fantasy / steampunk at most. *EDIT:* It appears I'm just being silly, and the Hugos include fantasy. Ironically, the biggest fantasy series of our time by far has won 3 times in Novella form and once in TV form, but never the novels!
- mapontosevenths 1mo agoThe difference between science fiction and fantasy was always only a tenuous distinction imposed by the few nerds who cared a little too much. As we age out of being culturally relevant, and newer (likely less literate) generations take over the definitions will change, and perhaps should. To me only hard science fiction will ever count, but I recognize that I'm in the minority there and also don't want to scare away the three remaining readers through gatekeeping.
- srean 1mo agoFantasys felt so lazy to me. Although sometimes I do enjoy the descriptions. But there is always an escape hatch out of a trouble and one that was not foreshadowed. It is constraints that makes things interesting and especially the higher order consequences of constraints and new tech.
- mapontosevenths 1mo agoAgreed. Fiction where the solution was "and then he found out he was the chosen one so magic happened" are unsatisfying.
- smgpie 1mo agoWhat you described does not qualify as a good fantasy either. There needs to be rules even in the world of magic, and eventually so called hard fiction and fantasy only really differ in the way how they present the fantasies. There is a book I love: Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny, in which he first wrote about fantasy figures with magic powers in Buddhism tales, and then revealed that they were just humans with high tech and play gods to those who don't.
- srean 1mo agoThanks for the recommendation . Sounds like a good read.
- SamBam 1mo agoYou're not the only one to be taken aback by that. Yes, the Hugos do fantasy, but I'm not sure I would have even thought to categorize Sinners as fantasy. I mean, yes, it has vampires. Was From Dusk till Dawn fantasy? But as a sister comment suggests, categorization is never easy, and probably just reinforced personal biases. (See Old Town Road being reminded from Billboard's country music list.)
- neaden 1mo agoI think by definition any vampire story is a fantasy story yes. Since vampires are not real and thus a fantasy creature.
- welferkj 1mo agoI'd say that line can be blurred somewhat by "Blindsight". "Not real" isn't where I'd put the line, it's "not plausibly and consistently explained (or at least explained away) within the laws of nature.
- SamBam 1mo agoThere's more to Fantasy than a single boolean "does it contain something that is not real?" Fantasy gets applied to the work as a whole, to its dominant tone and structure, not to one element. A work of fantasy usually has other elements that show it to be such. Is there world-building? Is it a quest or a hero story? Is there some kind of lore that grounds the whole universe? Not all of those are necessary, but usually you can clearly define the whole work holistically as Fantasy. From Dusk till Dawn in particular is a straight crime thriller that turns into a horror movie. Ok, I got nerd-sniped into trying to define Fantasy after saying I wouldn't.
- neaden 1mo agoI don't think crime thriller or horror have anything to do with if a story is fantasy. Alien is a sci fi movie and a horror movie. Psycho is a horror movie with no fantasy elements. Sinners is a fantasy horror movie. It sounds like you are talking about epic or high fantasy, but there is fantasy romance, fantasy detective, fantasy crime thriller etc. You can even have a fantasy sci fi movie like Star Wars.
- ycombinete 1mo agoWhat is the biggest fantasy series of our time?
- stevenwoo 1mo agoA Song of Ice and Fire (contemporary writing I assume), it lost to Harry Potter book against one of GRRM’s best books/chance for win in novel category one year and Spin in another year(Accelerando was another nominee that year)
- 3eb7988a1663 1mo agoSurely on cultural impact Harry Potter has to win. While GoT had a decade flash in the pan, Harry Potter is still deeply in the cultural zeitgeist. "Muggles", "You're a Hufflepuff", etc have become cemented into our vocabulary. GoT is undoubtedly more complex, interesting world, but it never had a generation of children reading the midnight book release. That the author actually penned the series finale is also worth something.
- stevenwoo 1mo agoThe Hugo voting is kind of skewed since it’s a membership thing where anyone can join but one has to be aware of it and care enough to join.
- ycombinete 1mo agoThat's what I was thinking! I was sure my parent meant GoT. But there can't be many metrics at all where GoT beats out HP for the title of "biggest fantasy series of our time".
- GlobalChubby 1mo agoThe Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin
- watwut 1mo agoThat one is great.
- fsloth 1mo agoSinners was very cool but I'm surprised to find it as Hugo winner.
- glimshe 1mo agoWith the exception of that really cool scene in the middle, I found Sinners boring and forgettable.
- b473a 1mo agoClair Obscur is going to be game of the year every year for the next decade.
- sdenton4 1mo agoWhich is too bad, because Blue Prince is the better game. :) I'm playing through Clair Obscur now. It's above average for aaa stuff. But there are way too many cut scenes, and dodge/parry mechanics continue to be tedious. And the story is fine, but isn't really grabbing me. Sigh. Blue Prince, on the other hand, is quite probably the best puzzle game I have ever played. My partner and I worked on it for months, and have a 50+ page Google doc of notes.
- bobson_dugnutt5 1mo ago[dead]
- fooker 1mo ago> worked on it for months, and have a 50+ page Google doc of notes. That sounds more like a part time job than a game. I'm curious if you play it for the mental challenge? I feel challenged enough at $dayjob that all I want from games is mindless relaxation.
- sdenton4 1mo agoTo be sure, it was a couple few hours here and there, not at the scale of a job. Blue Prince is an example of what fills are calling 'notebook games' -- instead of giving you lots of qol stuff, you just use a notebook to keep notes. The act of writing and arranging your notes is actually quite immersive. It's also fun! Blue Prince has layers of puzzles and story... It's pretty reasonable to play to the credits, and not get into the depths of the post credits game; it's a very reasonable cutoff point for non-sickos.
- glimshe 1mo agoThat's the beauty of Blue Prince. The core game doesn't require all of that. You can get to a satisfying ending with moderate puzzle solving. But after finishing the game, there are still hundreds of hours worth of optional puzzles left.
- sdenton4 1mo agoAllow me to make a small recommendation for the "best related work": Ada Palmer's 'Inventing the Renaissance.' It's a fantastic work of complex history, told with the tools of science fiction and fantasy writing. But it remains a high quality academic work: the tools are used to unravel the telling of a gay and complicated topic, but you still get the vastness. If you like ACOUP, it should be right up your alley.
- marcus_holmes 1mo agoI was really put off by the Terra Ignota series. I struggled through it, but her writing really didn't gel with me. I've been resisting reading "Inventing the renaissance" because of that, though it does come highly recommended. I found it very USian [0] - obsessed with religion (and the overt assumption that emperors are a good thing was unsettling). And I also found her position that all the best of human thought lay in the past (the greek classics and the renaissance specifically in this case) deeply at odds with my worldview. [0] I have noticed that US writers tend to feature religion prominently in their writing (e.g. Brandon Sanderson, not that this stops me from enjoying his writing, which I do). I read a new writer and make a bet whether they're USian after a couple of chapters based on their attitude to religion, and I've been mostly right.
- sdenton4 1mo agoA couple thoughts here... Palmer's handling of the different groups in Terra Ignota takes both sides, in every case. The case for why people join the imperial group has to be made, and made honestly. But problems with that approach are also pretty clear, and well explored: at the very least, elites get weird if they aren't responsive to the people, and the elites in Terra Ignota get very, very weird. I think she takes a bit more time setting up the positive case for the imperials exactly because it's pretty alien to us. Or, at least it was before our current global swing towards authoritarianism. Europeans were also once pretty obsessed with religion, as you might recall. They may be less so now, but who's to say the pendulum won't swing? This is one of the things I loved about the series -- the future or build is very different because the pendulum has swung in ways that aren't obvious to us, from our modern perspective. Just as the people of Florence would find some of our obsessions pretty strange and unexpected.
- busymom0 1mo agoTaking about scifi, if you guys haven't watched the tv show SILO yet, I'd highly recommend it. Everyone I've recommended it to so far has been thoroughly impressed.
- NitpickLawyer 1mo agoOne of the best adaptations of a series to TV, up there with The Expanse and the like. I read the books after season 1, and still enjoy the show very much. They've taken some adaptation liberties, but they're fully supported by Hugh Howey and they make a lot of sense.
- busymom0 1mo agoThe Expanse was my favorite tv show! However with the latest season finale of season 3 of SILO, it may have become my favorite now. Any other tv show recommendations? We seem to have similar taste.
- nickcw 1mo agoDisappointed to see I already read the Hugo winner for best novel - The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow. It is a worthy winner in my opinion. Fantasy with a sci-fi element along with a story which takes some untangling. Five stars from me :-)
- js2 1mo agoDrive-by recommendation, not having read The Everlasting yet: The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez.
- shagie 1mo agoThe one that caught me off guard was Old Man's War by John Scalzi as best series. > The Hugo Award for Best Series is one of the Hugo Awards given each year for science fiction or fantasy stories published in or translated into English during the previous calendar year. The award is available for series of science fiction or fantasy stories consisting of at least 3 published works totaling at least 240,000 words, with at least one work released or translated into English during the previous calendar year. A losing finalist becomes eligible again with the publication of at least two new works totaling at least 240,000 words. And now, checking on it... The Shattering Peace was released in September of 2025. I guess I've got another item for my reading list (currently going through the classics of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser... I wonder if that will ever be eligible for a retro Hugo Award for series).
- mpalmer 1mo agoColor me surprised. The first book was the only one I got through. Scalzi's characterizations in that one are singular, in that all of his characters think and talk like exactly the same snark-spewing geeky dude. Even the very few women. I should look into the sequel, I'd be happy for him if he stretched himself after the first one.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- shagie 1mo agoThe first one was very much written in an homage to Starship Troopers and it was an early work of his. His very first one was Agent to the Stars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_to_the_Stars#Publication_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_to_the_Stars#Publication... - available online at https://scalzi.com/agent/ https://scalzi.com/agent/ ) which was a book that he didn't want to write in that he wanted to make sure he could write as a career before writing the book he'd been thinking about for a long time... it's ok, maybe better than ok, but not great. He didn't want to find out that he didn't have the stuff to be a professional writer with the book that he really wanted to write. That book that he really wanted to write was Old Man's War. I would put it as a good one, but not a great one. A young man inspired by Heinlein and Haldeman writing military science fiction as his first real book. His later books get better as he became a more mature writer writing new ideas rather than the story he had in the back of his mind for the past decade. The Ghost Brigades (I believe) is better than the previous (it deals with the special forces). The Human Division and The End of All Things were written as serialized chapters that kind of stand on their own and I believe that format worked quite well with him. I will note that... he likes snark. I don't recall much in his later Old Man's War books... I think he got it out in The Interdependency (a fun series but you have to be ok with snark and casual vulgarity - the Audible is read by Wil Wheaton (some may be turned off by that alone) who is able to read and handle the snark and casual vulgarity quite well). I will recommend it if one is ok with a very snarky character - it's a political intrigue series.
- aaron695 1mo ago[dead]
- mike_tyson 1mo agothese look like the books you see on goodreads choice awards for some reason, i find that very off putting
- stevenwoo 1mo agoJust listened to The River Has Roots - very short and good adaptation IMHO, it has a bit of singing integral to plot and that is one thing I have trouble translating to the sounds in my head when reading paper books so it’s a big plus for me.
- MrCoffee7 1mo agoThis is such a crappy article - why didn't it include any images of the book covers, etc.? It seems that writing and journalism have become so bad.