2026 Locus, Nebula, & Hugo lists > Likes and Comments
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The Nebula Award nominees were announced: https://nebulas.sfwa.org/9192-2/Best Novel
When We Were Real, Daryl Gregory
🏆The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Stephen Graham Jones
Katabasis, R.F. Kuang
Death of the Author, Nnedi Okorafor
The Incandescent, Emily Tesh
Sour Cherry, Natalia Theodoridou
Wearing the Lion, John Wiswell
Awards were given on June 6: https://nebulas.sfwa.org/award-year/2...
Locus Award finalists were announced: https://locusmag.com/2026/04/2026-top...Science Fiction Novels
The Folded Sky, Elizabeth Bear
Picks & Shovels, Cory Doctorow
Notes from a Regicide, Isaac Fellman
When We Were Real, Daryl Gregory
All That We See or Seem, Ken Liu
Where the Axe Is Buried, Ray Nayler
Slow Gods, Claire North
🏆 Death of the Author, Nnedi Okorafor
The Shattering Peace, John Scalzi
Shroud, Adrian Tchaikovsky
Fantasy Novels
The Devils, Joe Abercrombie
The Tomb of Dragons, Katherine Addison
Lessons in Magic and Disaster, Charlie Jane Anders
A Drop of Corruption, Robert Jackson Bennett
🏆 The Everlasting, Alix E. Harrow
The Raven Scholar, Antonia Hodgson
Hemlock & Silver, T. Kingfisher
Katabasis, R.F. Kuang
The Incandescent, Emily Tesh
Queen Demon, Martha Wells
First Novels
A Song of Legends Lost, M.H. Ayinde
Red Rabbit Ghost, Jen Julian
When Devils Sing, Xan Kaur
Awake in the Floating City, Susanna Kwan
Luminous, Silvia Park
Archive of Unknown Universes, Ruben Reyes Jr.
North Sun, Or The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther, Ethan Rutherford
Blob, Maggie Su
Song of Spores, Bogi Takács
🏆 Sour Cherry, Natalia Theodoridou
Locus Awards were given on May 30: https://locusmag.com/2026/05/2026-loc...
The Hugo Award nominees were announced: https://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-hi...Best Novel
A Drop of Corruption, Robert Jackson Bennett
Death of the Author, Nnedi Okorafor
Shroud, Adrian Tchaikovsky
🏆The Everlasting, Alix E. Harrow
The Incandescent, Emily Tesh
The Raven Scholar, Antonia Hodgson
The Hugo Awards were given on August 30: https://www.thehugoawards.org/2026/08...
Just getting to this! Thanks, Chris. Lots of books to look forward to.
The Nebula Award nominees were announced. See message 2 for the Best Novel short list and a link for other categories.
I think the Nebula finalists were kinda underwhelming, very few will go to my Hugo ballot.
Locus Award finalists were announced. See message 3 for the lists of finalists and a link for other categories.
The Hugo Award nominees were announced. See message 4 for details.
The Raven Scholar????? WTF!!🤣🤣🤣 ...yeah now I know someone is paying these award committeesExcited for the Devils and Katabasis and T.Kingfisher (she won a Hugo before)
Thank you for sharing
Agreed, Shroud was excellent and I would be happy if it wins. I thought The Incandescent was meh and I DNF'd The Death of the Author and have not been able to get back to it. Both The Everlasting and The Raven Scholar seem like strong contenders given reader responses.A Drop of Corruption was a fun read but I'll be disappointed if it wins after The Tainted Cup winning last year.
Locus announced its award winners: https://locusmag.com/2026/05/2026-loc...Science Fiction Novel: Death of the Author, Nnedi Okorafor
Fantasy Novel: The Everlasting, Alix E. Harrow
First Novel: Sour Cherry, Natalia Theodoridou
Not one of the six Hugo nominees for best novel has a male as the primary protagonist. These awards are now DEI circle-jerks based solely on "here's the best book that meets our social values". -TJB
Thomas wrote: "Not one of the six Hugo nominees for best novel has a male as the primary protagonist. These awards are now DEI circle-jerks based solely on "here's the best book that meets our social values". -TJB"Great, we can do that until there are as many winners without a male protagonist as there are winners with a male protagonist.
DEI is a top-down process by an employer. These awards are bottom-up voting by fans (Hugo and Locus) and authors (Nebula). If you have a problem with the nominations, your issue is with the general trends of SFF as a whole. There is nothing wrong with disagreeing with the short lists, but it's the whole SFF genres that have changed, not some small group of judges.
Thomas wrote: "Not one of the six Hugo nominees for best novel has a male as the primary protagonist. These awards are now DEI circle-jerks based solely on "here's the best book that meets our social values". -TJB"In addition to what Ines and Chris have so kindly pointed out, A Drop of Corruption is narrated by Dinios Kol, who is a male protagonist.
The Nebula Awards were given on June 6: https://nebulas.sfwa.org/award-year/2...The Best Novel award went to The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter also won the Bram Stoker award for Best Novel and earlier had won the Locus award for Best Horror Novel. It's an amazing work and I highly recommend it.I'm very impressed with this year's Nebula winners. I love Thomas Ha (who won Best Noveletter) and Jennifer Hudak (who won Best Poetry, a new category this year), and I read the winning short story by Effie Seiberg and thought it was a fantastic satire. I've read Amal El-Mohtar's The River Has Roots and thought it was good for what it is, but that kind of fairy-tale like story doesn't appeal to me as much as it does to other readers.
As for the above discussion all I'll say (and hopefully I won't get myself in trouble with the mods this time): One of the invaluable benefits of reading is it helps us develop empathy and an appreciation of human experiences outside of our own. It broadens our understanding of the world and of humanity. That SFFH has been expanding in the kinds of stories we can find in those genres only speaks to how powerfully those genres can express the broader human experience and that is a very excellent thing and should be celebrated.
Imma huge Tchaikovsky fan and I DNF’ed Shroud :(
MadProfessah wrote: "Imma huge Tchaikovsky fan and I DNF’ed Shroud :("and that's one I really liked
I loved Shroud. It's intense and has more of a horror vibe than Tchaikovsky's other works, so I can see how it may not appeal to some readers. But it's wonderfully creative and it pays off for its intensity by the end.
In other SFF award news, a book that was overlooked by the big US awards, possibly due to it not being published in the US until recently:Just announced on social media, E. J. Swift's When There are Wolves Again just won the 2026 Arthur C. Clarke award. It had previously won the 2025 British Science Fiction Association award for best novel. Now that it's available in the US, the Kindle version is currently US$2.99 on Amazon. There's also an audiobook, available at Audible, Libro.fm and probably elsewhere, but that doesn't appear to be on sale at the moment. Libby is not showing this book in the deep search, even though it's released now in the US at least in digital formats--I'm not sure why that it is, but that means US libraries likely will not have it yet. Hence why I broke down and bought the ebook--I've been waiting for a year to read this one!!!
CJ wrote: "In other SFF award news, a book that was overlooked by the big US awards, possibly due to it not being published in the US until recently:Just announced on social media, E. J. Swift's When There are Wolves Again just won the 2026 Arthur C. Clarke award."
Thanks for this update, CJ! When There are Wolves Again just came on to my radar recently when I read a discussion online about the books that were up for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Wolves was the hands-down favorite of all of the people who contributed. I'll bump it up on my TBR (and add it to my potential audiobooks list).
The Hugo Awards were announced: https://www.thehugoawards.org/2026/08...The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow won Best Novel.
I have had The Everlasting on suspended hold on Libby for months. Maybe this will motivate me to make time for it. I've heard nothing by good things about it, and I loved the author's short story in the Someone in Time anthology. I highly recommend the winning short story, "In My Country" by Thomas Ha. Ha hasn't published any longer works so far, but he's an author who's been making waves with his short works. He writes mostly in the weird fiction vein of spec fic, often bridging over into SF, dystopia, horror and fantasy.
You can read/listen to "In My Country" online for free here: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/ha_0...
I thought The Everlasting was quite interesting
CJ wrote: "I have had The Everlasting on suspended hold on Libby for months. Maybe this will motivate me to make time for it. I've heard nothing by good things about it, and I loved the author's short story i..."Do give The Everlasting a try. I thought it gave a very different take on time travel stories along with an unusual structure to a romance.
The award ceremony was hosted by Ursula Vernon and she was a hoot!Happy H.H. Pak won for Best Novelette and also A Wizard of Earthsea Graphic Novel for its category. Sad Andor failed to win anything even though it apparently got three noms in the short form dramatic presentation category but the committee decided to put the series in the long form one, and then lost to Sinners. Unlike Murderbot, it will never won any Hugo since it ended.
Feminine Male and Masculine Female=Hugo award. I guess we're still twisting the gender tropes to appease the pink-haired, box-wine crowd? Hey, anybody remember when stories by Ursula K. Le Guin won Hugo's? Back when women wrote actual science fiction and not soap opera slop.
Thomas wrote: "Feminine Male and Masculine Female=Hugo award. I guess we're still twisting the gender tropes to appease the pink-haired, box-wine crowd? Hey, anybody remember when stories by Ursula K. Le Guin won..."The irony of bringing of Le Guin in this sort of comment. Have you not read Hugo and Nebula-winning The Left Hand of Darkness?
Oh, Thomas, we don't do that here. Our group does not allow generalizations or stereotypes of whole groups. Please try a kinder response.
Locus Magazine published its recommended reading list: https://locusmag.com/2026/02/2025-rec...
The most relevant categories are below, but you can follow the link for recommendations of short fiction, horror, etc.
Science Fiction Novels
Sunward, William Alexander
Dark Diamond, Neal Asher
The King Must Die, Kemi Ashing-Giwa
The Folded Sky, Elizabeth Bear
Landfall, James Bradley
Outlaw Planet, M.R. Carey
Moderation, Elaine Castillo
The Book of Guilt, Catherine Chidgey
Picks & Shovels, Cory Doctorow
Notes from a Regicide, Isaac Fellman
When We Were Real, Daryl Gregory
The Essence, Dave Hutchinson
The Dream Hotel, Laila Lalami
Transmentation | Transience, Darkly Lem
All That We See or Seem, Ken Liu
Metallic Realms, Lincoln Michel
Red Star Hustle, Sam J. Miller
Where the Axe Is Buried, Ray Nayler
Slow Gods, Claire North
Death of the Author, Nnedi Okorafor
One Way Witch, Nnedi Okorafor
Esperance, Adam Oyebanji
Halcyon Years, Alastair Reynolds
The Shattering Peace, John Scalzi
When There Are Wolves Again, E.J. Swift
We Lived on the Horizon, Erika Swyler
Song of Spores, Bogi Takács
Shroud, Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Book of Records, Madeleine Thien
A Philosophy of Thieves, Fran Wilde
Hole in the Sky, Daniel H. Wilson
The Salt Oracle, Lorraine Wilson
Fantasy Novels
The Devils, Joe Abercrombie
The Tomb of Dragons, Katherine Addison
A Granite Silence, Nina Allan
Lessons in Magic and Disaster, Charlie Jane Anders
Angel Maker, Elizabeth Bear
A Drop of Corruption, Robert Jackson Bennett
Once Was Willem, M.R. Carey
The Sovereign, C.L. Clark
The Works of Vermin, Hiron Ennes
Dead Hand Rule, Max Gladstone
The Everlasting, Alix E. Harrow
The Raven Scholar, Antonia Hodgson
Secrets of the First School, T.L. Huchu
Honeyeater, Kathleen Jennings
Written on the Dark, Guy Gavriel Kay
Hemlock & Silver, T. Kingfisher
Snake-Eater, T. Kingfisher
Katabasis, R.F. Kuang
The Adventures of Mary Darling, Pat Murphy
Harmattan Season, Tochi Onyebuchi
Waterblack, Alex Pheby
Major Arcana, John Pistelli
The Rose Field, Philip Pullman
Shadow Ticket, Thomas Pynchon
The Isle in the Silver Sea, Tasha Suri
The Incandescent, Emily Tesh
Queen Demon, Martha Wells
First Novels
A Song of Legends Lost, M.H. Ayinde
Acts of God, Kanan Gill
Red Rabbit Ghost, Jen Julian
When Devils Sing, Xan Kaur
Dwelling, Emily Hunt Kivel
Awake in the Floating City, Susanna Kwan
Luminous, Silvia Park
Archive of Unknown Universes, Ruben Reyes Jr.
North Sun, Or The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther, Ethan Rutherford
Nothing in the Basement, Romie Stott
Blob, Maggie Su
Sour Cherry, Natalia Theodoridou