In her recent critical study Dispelling Fantasies: Authors of Color Reimagine a Genre, Joy Sanchez-Taylor notes that the success of Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy—the first volume of which won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2016—played a significant role in collapsing a distinction between SF and fantasy that had hitherto operated like a fortified border, maintaining the cultural distinction afforded to a certain kind of hard SF. [1] The fact that we find ourselves with a majority-fantasy Hugo Best Novel shortlist in 2026 is something that wouldn’t have happened without that transition in the award from SF to SFF. [2] However, it’s also important to note that the Hugos have always periodically recognised works of fantasy—perhaps the most notorious example being the victory of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in a 2001 shortlist that also included George R. R. Martin’s A Storm of Swords—and so the awards giving prominence to fantasy is not automatically new or progressive.

Nonetheless, the context of this year’s award is acutely political. Not only has the year of Jemisin’s first win—2016—since become universally recognised, in terms of Anglo-American history, as a significant turning point, with Brexit and Trump’s first presidential election victory marking a brutal eruption of counterrevolutionary politics within societies that appeared to be at last on the point of moving away from the capitalist heteropatriarchal norms of the twentieth-century West. The explicit theme of more than one of the shortlisted novels is literally in tune with the No Kings protests of the mid-2020s. More generally, the particular spread of works on this list—ranging from epic to romantasy-adjacent and contemporary fantasy to hard SF and an SF-adjacent mainstream novel—arguably covers the full range of contemporary SFF more than any previous Hugo shortlist and therefore offers an unprecedented opportunity to examine the state of the field today.

The obvious place to start is with Robert Jackson Bennett’s A Drop of Corruption, the sequel to the biopunk-themed The Tainted Cup (2024), which of course won last year’s award. In that novel we were introduced to the Holmes-and-Watson duo of the ludex Anagosa Dolabra (Ana) and her young assistant Dinios Kol (Din), who is an engraver—someone who has been alchemically modified to have a perfect memory—but also dyslexic. Together they must solve a particularly inventive and gruesome murder that has ramifications for the delicately poised balance of power in the splendidly realised Empire of Khanum. With its quirky protagonists, imaginative worldbuilding and queer vibe, Bennett’s blend of police procedural and epic fantasy was clearly a welcome breath of fresh air to 2025 Hugo voters. Should we therefore regard the sequel as this year’s favourite?

I don’t think so. A Drop of Corruption is an enjoyable read and introduces a likeable new character, Malo, to the investigating team, while switching location to a border zone of the empire; but I had the feeling while reading that the trajectory of the fantasy element of the series was starting to interfere with the pacing of the crime plot of the novel, or vice versa. In particular, I guessed the identity of the villain too early for complete satisfaction but then had to wade through more plot to get to the revelations concerning the nature of the empire and Ana’s position within it. This is not to say that the discussions of the general undesirability of kings, how empires differ from kingdoms, whether empires are better than kingdoms, and, indeed, whether an empire even remains an empire when it stops behaving like one (i.e., by no longer making further conquests) aren’t fascinating when we get to them, but by this point we’re already more than three hundred pages into a novel which had originally shown no sign of going in this direction. It’s not necessary to be a left-wing literature professor to realise that we’re suddenly reading political commentary on contemporary America. The authority of Ana within the text is used to advocate for the absolute importance of impartial justice. Bennett digresses further on such matters in his author’s note, accusing fantasy of too often being enamoured of autocracies, and citing Terry Pratchett’s comment that someone seems to have inserted into everyone’s brain a space which says “Kings, What a good idea” (p. 459).

The most interesting element of his argument, though, is when Bennett relates a twenty-first-century concern with the limitations of democracy to an accompanying rise in fantasies centering autocratic rulers. In particular, he uses the third person plural to criticise 2010s audiences for how “we eagerly gobbled up tales of crude, primitive worlds where petty resentments, sexual sadism, and sheer stupidity regularly led to the torture, deprivation, and deaths of thousands [...] and sat captivated as privileged princes indulged in murder, rape, and the sexual assault and torture of children, without even a gesture towards justice” (p. 460). The target here is clearly the global phenomenon of Game of Thrones, the television adaption of Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, which initially aired between 2011 and 2019. While I agree that all of us who have read or watched such things should consider to what extent that makes us complicit with the way in which the violent and antidemocratic behaviours identified by Bennett have become normalised in the public realm, I also think that there are dangers in responding by choosing to make fantasy into a political battleground without first carefully establishing the parameters of debate.

The Guardian’s recent plea that The Lord of the Rings should not be used as “a weapon in the culture wars” is certainly a laughable example of trying to close the stable door after the horse has bolted. In the paper’s native UK, right-wing politicians such as Reform’s Danny Kruger see themselves as heroes “fighting the long defeat, as Tolkien said.” Tolkien’s work has also been regularly cited as their key inspiration by figures such as Giorgia Meloni and J. D. Vance. Therefore, while there are progressive antecedents to the current rise of fantasy, we shouldn’t blind ourselves to the fact that like any enchanted sword, it’s a double-edged phenomenon. However, the section of fandom invested in the Hugos in the second half of the 2010s were championing very different types of stories than either Tolkien’s or Martin’s. We need to be careful before we label one type of fantasy good and another bad because, before you know it, we could end up someplace else entirely, trapped in a zero-sum argument as to whether, for example, queering gender in a fictionalised fourteenth-century China is less or more important than fighting for justice in a fantasy empire.

While A Drop of Corruption is written in the context of basic justice being under threat in the US, the risk attached to its approach is that, in highlighting the primacy of justice, we end up passively accepting other typical facets of empire—hierarchical rule, division of wealth and labour, rudimentary public services and social provision—as normal features of life that would be fine as long as the forces of law and order weren’t subject to corruption. It still seems to me that the most effective way of politically contesting what is happening today is not to address specific flaws of autocracy but to make the counter offer of a radically transformed future. But can fantasy even do this?

Well, it can certainly ask questions about how we want to live and promote alternative values to those currently being upheld by our governments, as The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson demonstrates. Hodgson is a British former publisher—at one point she was editor-in-chief at Little, Brown—who became a writer of historical crime fiction. The Raven Scholar, the opening instalment of a planned trilogy, is her first fantasy novel. It’s nearly six hundred and fifty pages long in the UK paperback edition and, it must be said, tremendous fun if you’re a fan of the genre. I absolutely raced through it and will definitely read the sequels. I can imagine Hodgson gleefully enjoying herself while concocting this winning blend of cynicism, treachery, and anti-heroic behaviour, which nevertheless mainly keeps the dial turned down a notch or two below, say, Joe Abercrombie, so that we can still feel comfortable actually liking the characters.

As with A Drop of Corruption, the setting of The Raven Scholar is an empire—in this case, the Empire of Orrun, whose people are categorised within eight different caste types: Ravens, Foxes, Oxes, Tigers, Bears, Hounds, Monkeys, and Dragons. As the novel begins, the current emperor is coming to the end of the maximum permitted period of rule (twenty-four years), and the selected contenders of the different castes have gathered at the capitol, Imperial Island, to compete in a gruelling series of challenges and contests in order to find his successor. If this set-up sounds a bit like the 2001 Hugo winner, with its school-houses and Triwizard Tournament, that’s because it is indeed a bit like that, but with more malice and political chicanery. The twist at the outset is that the Ravens’ contender has been murdered and commoner Neema Kraa, who has risen from Junior Archivist (Third Class) to the ministerial role of High Scholar in the emperor’s highly aristocratic court, is commanded both to solve the murder and take over the vacant contender position.

In other words, from the outset, the themes of the novel encompass justice and class war. To these components can be added plenty of action, intrigue, romance, tragedy, and humour, but perhaps the abiding concern of the novel is with agency and its relation to power. In the end—well, five hundred pages in—Neema is brought face to face with a question that many of us have also had to contemplate of whether to go back to the library and write her monograph or to do the unthinkable in order to save not just the empire but the world itself: “She would have to take the throne for herself” (p. 498). For seemingly, the only way to avert bad outcomes is by taking total power … or is it? In raising this question and exploring it in great detail, Hodgson provides her fantasy with a level of political and philosophical sophistication that makes it worthy of deeper attention.

I wouldn’t want to overburden The Raven Scholar, which first and foremost is a work of entertainment, with comparisons to Martin and Tolkien. However, I do think it takes a good stab at presenting a different worldview free of both Christian nationalism and reductive beliefs concerning the fallibility of human nature. It’s nice for a change to finish the first volume of a fantasy trilogy without having a bad feeling about exactly where the final volume is going to land. One reason for this is that Hodgson’s castes turn out to be less descriptions of essentialist types and more political vehicles for free-thinking adherents. For example, far from being the stolid workers the name implies, the Oxes turn out to possess a sophisticated political philosophy:

“It was a common misunderstanding with Oxes that their idea of harmony meant everyone working together on the same thing, at the same time. Ploughing forward stoically in unison. But that wasn’t their philosophy. Every Ox team required a range of skills, character, experience. Understanding where you fitted within that team—your strengths and weaknesses—that was the key. Sometimes you led, sometimes you followed—depending on the task at hand. The secret of harmony was variety.” (p. 399)

It’s difficult not to see this as reminiscent of the doctrine of “from each according to their ability to each according their needs” first outlined by Karl Marx in Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875).

Maybe the Oxes will completely transform the empire into a communist Utopia? Maybe the Foxes will burn the whole system down? Maybe an inter-caste alliance will transform society in a different way? In this respect, The Raven Scholar does offer fleeting glimpses of alternate futures with the potential to resonate with contemporary readers. Of course, the following volumes of the trilogy may end up shutting down these possibilities and restoring the hierarchical structure of empire, but that is also an interesting facet of epic fantasy as a genre: It seems particularly well suited to showing how structures of dominion proliferate and replicate themselves even when they are disassembled. The question is therefore whether fantasy reflects a conservative belief in the essential fallibility of human nature or whether it maybe foregrounds how certain types of metanarrative function to write the stories of people’s lives despite their best efforts to resist?

This question is addressed squarely by the third book on this year’s shortlist, Alix E. Harrow’s The Everlasting, which has already won the 2026 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel ahead of its fellow Hugo shortlistees A Drop of Corruption, The Raven Scholar, and Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent (which I’ll discuss in part two of this review). I reviewed The Everlasting for Strange Horizons when it came out last autumn and asked how seriously we should take it in a context in which the mainstream press (both liberal and conservative) in the US and the UK regularly express ironic scepticism concerning women’s fantasy in general and “Romantasy” in particular. As I noted at the time, Harrow is not marketed as a romantasy author, but her books are often discussed as such and given “spice ratings” (the average for The Everlasting seems to be about 3/5, although I particularly enjoyed this blog review, which gave it “severe” ratings for spice, profanity, and violence). What is also clear from even a cursory internet search on the novel is that it is one of the most talked-about and best-loved novels of the year and must be considered a contender for further award wins (it’s also on the shortlist for this year’s World Fantasy Award).

So, what has made The Everlasting one of the novels to stand out from the field this year? I would argue that it’s not just that it centers a romantic relationship which has captured readers’ imaginations and tells the gender-flipped tale of a legendary female knight (who occupies an equivalent status to that of King Arthur or St George), but also that it successfully integrates this story with an argument concerning the importance of separating history from the ideology of the nation state. While Harrow’s Dominion resembles twentieth-century England, its very name suggests that the novel’s real topic is the dominance hierarchies inherent to the social structure of all nation states, understood as historical formations that evolved out of warbands. One way of thinking about The Everlasting is to consider its principal narrator, historian Owen Mallory, as a fantasy writer trying to find a way of telling the legend of the novel’s main protagonist, Una Everlasting. As we follow his different attempts to tell the story, we find that despite his best efforts to resist the logics of state domination embodied by the novel’s antagonist, the autocratic Vivian Rolfe, the outcome is always distressingly the same tale of nationalist supremacy. The problem for both history and fantasy is the same: How do you break free of the metanarrative of patriarchal hierarchy that seemingly consigns us to be forever subjects of tyrants? In making her despot a woman, Harrow provides a negative answer of “No Queens” to the question posed by Neema in The Raven Scholar as to whether the only way to save the world is for a woman to take power. Despite Vivian’s lean-in mentality of making her “own precedents” for becoming a great woman in history (p. 191), she is revealed as just as trapped by the logics of domination as the emperor in The Raven Scholar or any other autocrat in fantasy or history. Is there, then, any chance of escape at all?

Yes. That’s why the novel is so popular. But the escape doesn’t simply lie in the fact that Owen and Una love each other or that eventually they find a way to solve the time travel paradox by which Una dies in every past. Rather, the novel works because Harrow successfully deconstructs the metanarrative that leads so often to both history and fantasy repeating the same outcomes. By which I mean that, by repeatedly telling the same national legend, she first highlights the elements that lead to hierarchical domination and then progressively strips them out in order to find what has to be changed for the story to have a different result.

Harrow has already trialled a not dissimilar approach in her second novel, The Once and Future Witches (2020), in which the name “Everlasting” also features, but in that book the antagonist was an authoritarian patriarch. Therefore, the first choice made in The Everlasting is not to include any patriarchs or alpha males. This doesn’t eliminate patriarchy from the novel—it’s still a negative force impacting the lives of both the women and men—but it allows the reader to understand it as a systematic product of the nation state rather than just the actions of unpleasant men. Then progressively Una and Owen leave behind all possessions, all external markers of professions, and their sexes by “dressing sometimes as two men or two women,” until “they left so much behind them that they were not always sure what, if anything, remained to them” (p. 205). However, it transpires that, even after they have stripped everything away, the system is always able to fit Una back into the metanarrative by imposing first the category of “female subject” on her and layering the same old legend back on top. But then, as the novel strips out the idea of linear time and invokes a return of a more holistic relationship with the natural world of the woods (as implied by Una taking on the role of the legendary figure of the Green “Man”), Una is revealed not to be nothing but “everything at once”: “You were a knight with no master and a mother with no children; a manly woman and a womanly man; a hero whose name would be sung for a thousand years and an orphan whose name had already been forgotten” (p. 276). Ultimately, The Everlasting holds out the promise of an escape not just from all categorisation but history itself.

Through these reviews I have tried to show that, although all three of these novels are basically epic fantasies, albeit with added mystery or romance, they are nonetheless concerned with the task Jemisin identified in 2018, on the occasion of her historic third Hugo win: engineering possibility by finding a world where all of us can live. If these worlds are not necessarily in the “future” as it’s commonly understood, this is because the relationship between future and past is being questioned here and the simplistic idea of linear progress being rejected. Of these three novels, The Everlasting is the most accomplished, both in terms of its narrative structure and its conceptual framework. It’s also, as I noted in my review, “quite simply a beautiful novel.” I think it has a decent chance of winning the Hugo without necessarily being the standout favourite in what is generally considered to be a pretty open race. As I show in part two of this review, the three remaining novels on the shortlist bring different qualities to the table but also offer some interesting comparisons.

Endnotes

[1] One reason that Jemisin’s 2016 victory was particularly significant was because the Puppy campaigns to rig the Hugos during the middle years of the decade were in part an angry response to her June 2013 Continuum GOH speech, in which she called for the equivalent of the Australian Reconciliation process to take place within SFF in general and in the SFWA in particular. By winning the Hugo not just once but three years in succession with the three volumes of the Broken Earth trilogy, she seemed to set the agenda for a wider sea change. [return]

[2] For evidence of this shift, consider the Hugo winners in the pre-2010 years ending in “6” alone: Robert Heinlein’s Double Star in 1956; Roger Zelazny’s This Immortal and Frank Herbert’s Dune in 1966; Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War in 1976; Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game in 1986; Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age in 1996; Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin in 2006. Jemisin bucked many trends. [return]