Hugo Progress, Feb 2026

This is my second year participating in the Hugo Award. I am not attending the Worldcon (LAcon V in Los Angeles), but I have purchased a World Science Fiction Society membership again this year, and I have been reading eligible novels all year.

So far, I have read 17 eligible novels, and I’m hoping to fit in two more before the nomination deadline. (The deadline hasn’t been announced yet, but it seems to be typically mid-March.) That has been a significant commitment. I only read 29 novels in 2025. I’m not a fast reader, and lately I have had less time for reading.

I have to say, it has been a strange year. Nothing I’ve read this year has really knocked it out of the park. So far, the top contender is Death of the Author, by Nnedi Okorafor, which I read early in the year. It was a strange novel, and while I was reading it I didn’t think it would be one of my favorites, but ultimately it moved me and spoke to me more deeply than anything else I have read this year.

This year, I have put down a few eligible novels that were popular, but weren’t doing it for me. It is possible, and even likely, that one or more of those will be nominated as finalists, and I’ll have to pick them up again and finish them. However, I’m not going to do so unless they do actually make it as finalists. I realized late in the year that I had been trying to anticipate the finalists and read everything that seemed popular. That’s the wrong way to do it. I should read what I would normally read, only making an effort to read SF/F published in the eligible year, and then nominate from those. This offers the broadest diversity to the award process. It also means I don’t need to force myself to read a lot of things I wouldn’t normally choose for myself.

I’ve also decided this year to dip my toe into some of the other categories of fiction. I’m not reading short stories in advance, but I expect to read the finalists and vote on them. This will largely depend on their availability in “Voter Packet”. If I get through those quickly, I may move on to the novelette and maybe even the novella categories.