Nebula Awards Showcase 61

by Stephen Kotowych, Thomas Ha, P. A. Cornell

Genres: Science Fiction

378 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 15, 2026

Reviews

[Booksblabbering || Cait❣️]

This is a collection of the best works of science fiction and fantasy from 2025 as chosen selected by members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association.

The introduction was actually my favourite part of the book. Stephen sets the stage by musing on the dystopian-world we’re currently living in. 

The phrase "unprecedented times" has lost all meaning, as historic shocks have become regular. Politicians and billionaires so cartoonishly evil that Bond villains would tell them to tone it down a bit.

We discovered that the future sucks. No orbital colonies. No flying cars. No cure for world hunger or even the common cold. Grimdark, darker fantasy, and dystopian/utopians are rising in popularity.

With all that said, onto the collection!


SHORT STORIES:

Winner:
LASER EYES AIN'T EVERYTHING by Effie Seiberg.
This is basically a world where there exist superpowereds, but our protagonist is wheelchair-bound and no accommodations are made and she’s constantly sidelined. 

This was very in your face, not aiming any kind of nuance. It would make a good skit, but I personally prefer more subversion or subtlety.

THROUGH THE MACHINE by P.A. Cornell.
This was my favourite.
It’s a satire on how Hollywood turns you into a product in a near-future where actors are just used for publicity, their acting replaced by AI-generated doppelgängers.
This was very timely and touched on various topics plaguing the arts. There was also a touch of hope at the end which I appreciated.

SIX PEOPLE TO REVISE YOU by J.R. Dawson.
This was very sweet. Basically, there’s an operation where you can be ‘Revised’ based on the comments of six people who know you. 
It’s queer and ultimately, loving and accepting.

IN MY COUNTRY by Thomas Ha.
This was strange and outlandish, and honestly? I didn’t really ‘get’ the plot, but I appreciated the commentary - probably the most thought-provoking: the problem with ambiguity is that it demands interpretation. The demand for interpretation welcomes a different magnitude of contemplation and unanticipated dispute.
THE TAWLISH ISLAND SONGBOOK OF THE DEAD by E.M. Linden.
This was the most lyrical about the dead of an island and remembering your heritage.
We, the dead, clutch our shreds together, try to distinguish ourselves from the morning mist that breathes all over the island, hold tight to the gorse and use the rocks as anchors when the gales get up.

BECAUSE I HELD HIS NAME LIKE A KEY by Aimee Ogden.
This had a fey king, a human man, and other dimensions. This was the most ‘hard’ sci fi, and the atmospheric fey world was lost in the human’s monologues on dimensional theories.


POETRY
Winner: "The World to Come" by Jennifer Hudak.
I am not a connoisseur of poetry, so no comments here. They were fine, but nothing that stood out to me.


NOVELETTES

Winner: UNCERTAIN SONS by Thomas Ha, published in Uncertain Sons and Other Stories.
A biker carries his father's skull in backpack where he kills monsters. This was too action-packed for my taste, about family trauma and loss.
Looking at other reviews, I think this novelette would be better understood in conversation with its initial collection. I was underwhelmed and didn’t feel it offered as much commentary or conversation - not that novellettes have to.

Standout novelettes for me:
WE BEGIN WHERE INFINITY ENDS by Somto Ihezue.
This was a heartwarming story about a youthful trio of nerds - friends (potential lovers?) who want to change the world for the better and sneak out at night to install lights to protect fireflies.

THE NAME ZIYA by Wen-yi Lee.
This was the most interesting of everything I read. A magic system, a caste system, a poor girl selling part of her name (and herself) in order to afford tuition to a renowned University. It also managed to have a satisfying arc in such a short amount of time.
I didn’t know how little I had until I met someone else’s excess, and I burned to think I had ever been content with my own possessions.

NEVER EATEN VEGETABLES by H.H. Pak.
A ship glides through the night, behemoth mother, swollen with ten thousand human lives.
A sentient ship must make a terrible decision.Humans have similar shapes but they are not expected to serve similar functions. They make new versions of each other to—explore purposes. Not to fulfill them."
It’s tender and reflecting and occasionally funny.
"Natal Embryonic Vessel," says Lewa. 
"No." The frog gives her a side-eyed glance. "Never Eaten Vegetables." 
“What?" "Never Eaten Vegetables. That is my name. I have never eaten vegetables. My name is Never Eaten Vegetables."


NOVELLA
Winner: The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar:
My Review

NOVEL
 The Buffalo Hunter Hunter Stephen Graham Jones: 
My Review

AWARD FOR MIDDLE GRADE AND YOUNG ADULT FICTION
Winner: Sunrise on the Reaping Suzanne Collins:
My Review

I won’t comment on the other categories as I don’t have enough awareness of them, but here they are:

MULTIMEDIA AWARD FINALISTS THE 2025 NEBULA AWARD FOR COMIC:
Winner: Mary Shelley's School for Monsters: The Killing Stone by Jessica Maison.

RAY BRADBURY NEBULA AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING DRAMATIC PRESENTATION:
Winner: Murderbot: Season One Chris Weitz & Paul Weitz.
I will say I am surprised Sinners didn’t win.

THE 2025 NEBULA AWARD FOR GAME WRITING
Winner: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

I’d love to discuss your thoughts if you have any!
3.5 stars.🌟 - I don’t know, it feels weird to rate such a wide ranging collection.

Arc gifted by Publisher.

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[heptagrammaton]

An anthology and a year haunted by algorithms: a work-by-work unhelpful review, in bullet points.

Before that: Stephen Kotowych's introduction voices a nostalgia for a future that never came to pass and a feeling that nothing and everything has changed —

   Yet our [21st century's] silver anniversary came and went, and we, as a culture, just ignored it. No wistful remembrances, no collective stock-taking. Total silence.
   Maybe it's because, after all the buildup, once we actually got there, we discovered that the future kinda sucked.
   No orbital colonies. No meals in pill form. No flying cars.

feels oddly unoriginal, a re-treading of a worn deep ennui worn in the road of the postmodern condition, a sentiment that in my own brief living memory I've been hearing, flying cars and all, for at least a decade. Somewhat arrogant too, in the vantage point it assumes, as if it can survey the whole of the human condition. I suppose speculative fiction has always had a thing for cultural hegemonies.

 • Laser Eyes Ain't Everything by Effie Seiberg
   A sort of wholesome righteous vengeance fantasy about disability accessibility, tongue-in-cheek. Cute. Hillarious. I approve.

 • Through the Machine by P.A. Cornell
   Actor is somehow utterly unaware of currents in his own industry until a clichéd final act about realness, or something, which proves that in the near future of infinite billion-budget deepfaked Hollywood there shall still be small productions casting real people, which is the solution to artlessness in a financialized, committee-ridden, corrupt, circularly abusive, oligopolized art industry we have not yet glimpsed. All is well, and all manner of things shall be well.

 • Six People to Revise You by J.R. Dawson
   Unaired Black Mirror episode script gets lost, found in the Children's TV department, and has its ending re-written in a "be yourself" fashion.
   Dawson shows a great descptive capacity for the subtle cruelties of people, for the ways parents, friends, co-workers may misperceive us, and takes it to an affirmative, sweet end. I reject the notion that proper science fiction bust be "hard", but the person-altering nebulously sketched out technology at the centre of the plot felt too unlikely, mismatched to its surroundings.
   I show more harshness to Six People that I think it deserves, but I struggle to articulate my compounding small dissatisfactions with Dawson's short story in anything other than the feeling I've seen too much of its like and yet not enough.

 • In My Country by Thomas Ha
   Thomas Ha excels at images that hold you captive.
   Possibly the most genre-agnostic, allegorical piece of the set. The subtler workings of totalitarian violence. Ambivalent, yet not hopeless about resistance.

 • The Tawlish Songbook of the Dead by E.M. Linden

... Too late: she's spinning through thirty, forty, fifty years of memories. The pain is new and bright as a white-hot coin. No. Not that. A coin is small and can be handled. Grief is the sun itself. Everyone talks about it, as if it rises and falls,a s if it has seasons, The truth is, she'll orbit it her whole life, and she'll never be able to look at it without flinching.

   It's an old song, the lament of being cut of from ancestors and memories. It's an old song. And the ghosts that held you will sing it again, and again, and again.

 • Because I held his Name Like a Key by Aimee Odgen
   It is: a melancholy reflection on bodies and minds, a love story, a somewhat ensorcelling fabulation. It is also: Archfey/Alan Turing AU. I cannot make up my mind if picking up historical. If there is or isn't a time that is "too soon."
   This felt "too soon" for me—but perhaps all historical fiction is violence, is desecrating the tombs where the dead lie.

 • the poems:

I think poetry good by how much I have to say about it (even if all I have to say is compulsive quotation), so listen to what I don't say.

The 2025 laureate, Jennifer Hudak's The World to Come is a powerfully evocative poem of the recalcitrant revenant.

The same teacher, in a cheerier tone,
said the Messiah would gather us from
our graves, lead us to olam ha-ba:
the world to come, our birthright, our home.

I, barely more than a babe, did not ask
what one thing had to do with the other.
The “Jerusalem” we sang was a metaphor,
an idea of home; not actual houses
and highways and shops and hospitals.
Not a place already populated.

[...]   I did not ask for resurrection;
I have no use for olam ha-bah.
I am a corpse who pines for pine, and
this world to come is no world of mine. . .

   There is a timely aspect to an explicit refusal of coming home to a literal Jerusalem, an anti-Zionist in a theology of resistance.
   (Or a resistance to theo- and teleology. Amen.)

I am, personally, partial to Mari Ness's Care for Lightning , part elegy, part ode, part critical entry in our tradition of modern re-telling of Greek myth, to Hera,
   Mother.

you try facing eternity
with thunder, with knowing
that sound will never end, with
knowing how swiftly
things catch fire. You try
living with that inside your skin,
the crackles that can never leave,
knowing that no matter how far you go,
that lightning lingers against your bones.
Knowing that any wound you take,
will never fully heal.

              And, as they say —

Bitch got stuff done.

 • Uncertain Sons by Thomas Ha
  Delicious prose, unafraid to be a tad inscrutable. This is horror, and this is joy, and neither of them I can verbalize well. I will be reading more Thomas Ha.

 • Our Echoes Drifting Through the Marsh by Marie Croke
   If memory is a bog, you must forget, or you drown, or the giant birds eat you.
   Nifty world-building,
   (but I am getting weary in writing, and forcing myself to comb back and compare the stories in writing about it, and in this getting tired of tarrying with the loss of remembrance ritual by environmental displacement, and generational disconnection, and the inevitable ambiguously framed process of moving on.)

 • We Begin Where Infinity Ends by Somti Ihezue
   BE GAY, DO CRIMES TO THE HOSTILE INFRASTRUCTURE, SAVE THE FIREFLIES.
   cute but idk meh

 • The Name Ziya by Wen-yi Lee
   The epistemic violence of colonialism made literal.
   I did hope for a Haitian revolution situation and was disappointed. What is there instead is ambivalence, which is also true, and does suffice.

 • Never Eaten Vegetable by H.H. Pak
   Mothership, in the literary tradition of Martha Wells. Sentimental, but I loved it. I am a sap.

 • The Life and Times of Alavira the Great as Written by Titos Pavlou and Reviewed by Two Lifelong Friends by Eugenia Triantafyllou
   An unusual metafiction entry about the process of coming back to stories as an adult, that dialogue-in-time, as a dialogue.
   (Does not contain enough Alexiad. Shame.)
   (It is good that the children can be growing up with access to queer fiction.)
   If anything, does too good a job of portraying the most unreadable writing imaginable, that of seventeen-year-old me.
   

The through lines: AI, "AI", mundane dystopias, yes—but also a dedication to hold and guide and affirm and comfort. May be bittersweet, corny, cheesy, or any number of flavours. Fascinating in aggregate. Should I read more of the Showcases, or in some other way go through the backlog of Nebula finalist shorter fiction, I feel I may discover a tendency over time for fiction that, firstly, wants to hold you and reassure you... not that things are fine, but that life is something fine, and you are loved.

________
Review has been based off a digital advanced reader's copy, provided by the SFWA [Inc.] through NetGalley.

[D Dyer]

An incredibly solid selection of this year’s nebula winners, and nominees, I was incredibly pleased with the expansion into poetry this year to see a selection of speculative poems, and consequently to be introduced to some new authors. Of the short fiction selections I think all are quite well written and many have different enough styles that I think most people who enjoy speculative fiction are likely to find at least one story they like. Never eaten vegetables with its exploration of motherhood, and where life starts was one of my personal favorites.

[Peregine]

Based on a Netgalley ARC

This was disappointing. As a showcase, this contains multiple award winning sci fi and fantasy works, however, there was a real lack of variety. The short stories in particular, come across as very similar in style, with a preference for minimal world building and narcissistic protagonists combined with first person narrative. Sci Fi and Fantasy covers a wide range of fiction genres styles etc. however, these felt very bland too me.
"Laser Eyes Ain't Everything" is about a Karen in a wheel chair who was fired from some government department. She only thinks about her self and her plan to turn intersections into roundabouts. She has failed, probably because she calls them traffic circles. It is no surprise when she joins the villain. She was realistically insufferable.

"Through the Machine" is about AI movies and arguably shouldn't count as sci fi, because everything in it is technically feasible. While the author makes a few good points about AI and shippers, this still is kinda boring.

"Six People to Revise You" is about a world just like ours, except you can pay a company to fix you. Apparently to do so, you have to ask six people what should be changed. The narcissistic protagonist then burden different people with fixing her and then judges them for it. The first suggestion is literally along the lines of her being happy with who she is, but she rejects it. Of course the last person not only tells her not to change herself, but the reader is subjected to self affirmation slop.

What "In My Country" is about, I couldn't tell. The start couldn't hold my interest and skimming through the rest I repeatedly saw “in my country there is no king”

The Tawlish Island Songbook of the Dead" is about an island being evacuated told from the viewpoint of the ghosts, and the native beliefs about the dead play a big role. The presumably Anglican pastor is a character, but the author shows a lack of understanding of relevant Christian beliefs. It is one of the best short stories, but still not interesting for me. Not much happened.

"Because I Held His Name Like a Key" is about a fairy who is a sexual predator. I stopped reading it, because I am not into that.

There were also some poems. The best I could say about them is that they were short. One was even addressed to writers, suggesting that these works are really written by a relativity small group for each other.

Lastly, there were some Novelettes. They were a bit better than the short stories in some aspects. Not so much first person narcissists and a bit more world building. They were mostly forgettable though. I half of them.

[Andrew Cheung]

Some of the stories are stand outs and most are average. Some of the themes covered are the takeover of AI, loss of freedom. Also, there were poems and short stories/novels, which added some variety.

Overall poems- 3.5 Stars since only some stories were memorable. 3 Stories stood out to me.

I will summarize 3 of the stories I enjoyed. Through the machine discusses what if AI took over acting. We have some aspect of that via actors that have passed away and their likeness/voice is used in future movies or TV shows. This story describes the pain of having an actor being replaced by an AI version and even actors losing their jobs.

In my country- gives an analogy of what oppression feels like under the US government. Similar to what the US is facing with ICE raids and the infringement of our fundamental right- freedom of speech. A father sees his son speaking up through his stories and idly stands by. The government views his stories as threatening and his stories represent rhetoric that goes against their views/beliefs.

Never Eaten Vegetables- A program was created to create life from human genes. The scientist struggles to find ways to stabilize the program. Each new life is choose a name and one is called Never Eaten Vegtables. Creating life is a complex process and the results are not always going to be promising. Many of the test subjects die, leaving a mess and more unanswered questions about the scope of the project. An interesting story about creating life and the complexities of failing to create them to the government's exacting standards.

Through the machine 4/5
In my country- 5/5
Never Eaten Vegetables- 5/5

[Annette Jordan]

The Nebula Awards Showcase 61 edited by Stephen Kotowych is a great way to get a glimpse into what writers and readers of the science fiction and fantasy genres are really enjoying, collecting as it does some of the best short stories, poetry and novelettes of the year. It is a diverse collection in terms of both the authors featured and the stories they are writing, and as with any anthology some of the pieces resonated with me more strongly than others. My standout piece from the anthology was The Tawlish Island Songbook of the Dead by E.M. Linden, a truly memorable short story about home, heritage and our connections to those who have gone before us. The collection opens with Laser Eyes Ain't Everything by Effie Seiberg, an excellent piece that highlights how frustrating it is not to be heard and what a big difference even seemingly small accommodations can make to those with a disability, a subject that I am sure is close to the author's heart as an ambulatory wheelchair user. Through the Machine by P.A. Cornell felt very current as it explores art, technology and the encroaching presence of A.I. while Never Eaten Vegetable by H.H, Pak gives us an interesting ethical dilemma to chew on.
I enjoyed the collection and feel like it introduced me to several new authors whose work I would like to explore more.
I read and reviewed an ARC courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher, all opinions are my own.

[Thomas]

Thanks to all the Nebula celebrated authors, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and NetGalley for access to the Advanced Reader Copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The 61st book in this series contains all the short stories, novellas, and poems nominated for the 2026 Nebula awards of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. As such, the book contains some of the best science fiction and fantasy writing for the year 2025. In addition, the book provides a summary of each nominated finalist in the other Nebula award categories.

Like every collection of writing, even award nominated writing, there will be favorites and stories that don’t necessarily fit my tastes. That is especially true for science fiction and fantasy where some authors bring in challenging ideas, work with them, and challenge us in the process. The stories in the collection are worth reading for any science fiction and fantasy fan and others who want to stretch their minds on possibilities.