The polls are open for the 2026 Hugo Awards!

I grew up reading books whose covers were marked "Hugo Award Winner" or "Hugo Finalist”—I mean, not exclusively, that would be weird, I read plenty of books whose covers were marked "FORBIDDEN BY ORDER OF THE COUNCIL" and "CLASSIFIED MATERIAL" and "ESCATOLOGY RISK NIGHTMARE GREEN" and “DO NOT OPEN GLADSTONE THIS MEANS YOU” and so on—but because I didn't know many other SF fans at the time, I assumed these awards were decided upon by Secret Masters in a volcano lair. It was one of the pleasant surprises of my early adult life to discover that the Hugos were decided upon by, well, us—people who cared about science fiction and fantasy, who scraped together the relatively moderate stakes required to participate in the process.

And us can mean, you. For for the (relatively) low price of a Membership - as low as $50 this year - you too can join in the annual selection of the Neatest Things People Who Care To Participate in the World Science Fiction Society have Read This Year.

The finalists have been assembled by the extremely scientific process of asking everyone who voted on the award in 2025, "what have you read in the last year that you thought was particularly neat?" Because tons of books and stories come out each year, not to mention games and comics and films and TV shows, nobody's read everything. But the aggregate of what everybody has read covers a lot of ground. I'm a 80-100 book a year guy these days depending on the year and how you count (I started reading a good bit more 7 years ago—books are just about the easiest way to have "me time" when you have a young kid, and the Pandemic happened, and the internet got really boring if you don't like 1. being mad about stuff all the time, and 2. fighting with other people who are mad about the same things you are but who think you're mad in the wrong way), but I don't weight new releases heavily so I miss stuff all the time; often I find I've read about half of the books up for consideration, which is a delight. “Sire, good books have slipped past our sentries!” “What are you waiting for, fools? After them!”

One perk of being a voting member is that not only do you get the list of books and stories and so forth you might want to consider reading, you also, often, get the books themselves. The Hugo Voter Packet distributed to all voting members this year contains a whopping 16GB of books, stories, audiobooks, graphic novels, art books, and game codes. Even with the exorbitant cost of storage these days, it's a steal! All of my Craft Wars books are in there, all Bear's Whitespace books are in there and Katherine Addison's Chronicles of Osreth, Amal's novella is on there, Bennett's Drop of Corruption is in there, Tchaikovsky's Shroud, Hodgson's The Raven Scholar which I forget if I mentioned on here but is an enormous amount of fun right up to the harrowing last hundred pages that left me desperate for a sequel, and Emily Tesh's The Incandescent which I personally would have titled, Finally, A Magical Boarding School Novel Written By Someone Who Knows Something About Boarding School!! (This is why they don't let me in marketing departments.) I haven't Okorafor's Death of the Author or Harrow's Everlasting, so those are great pickups for me (I haven't read Shroud either, I'm behind on Tchaikovsky, it's refreshing if intimidating to find an author who is good and who writes good books faster than I can read them). Basically: unlimited beach reading just in time for beach season.

These books are provided as a courtesy to the voting membership, so we don't get paid royalties for them. I have found that this is one of those cases where "the value of free" is quite high—a person who cares about science fiction and fantasy enough to vote in the Hugos but who hasn't read my books is a person I'd very much like to have my books in front of—but if you have particular scruples about this sort of thing, 1. bless you, you saint, and 2. you could balance accounts quite easily by requesting the book of an author you like on this list from your local library (since Libraries Buy Books), or pre-ordering their next book (Pre-Orders are Love).

If that sounds at all like fun, get yourself a membership for the World Science Fiction Society and enjoy! The cheapest option on the link is the “WSFS Membership Only” one, which, if I’m reading the site correctly, costs $50 and gets you voting rights for the Hugos but no ability to participate in WorldCon. The “Virtual-Only” membership ($85) will give you access to the online portions of this year’s WorldCon, and voting rights. And if you fancy a trip to scenic Anaheim, CA in late August, there are of course in-person options too. (I’m going!) Here’s that link again.

And that’s the housekeeping done! I'm off to write. Take it easy, friends. It's a great spring day out there. Take care of one another. Work for the liberation of all sentient beings. And happy reading!