The first part of this shortlist review showed how fantasy novels have provided a fictional medium for exploring some of the big structural political issues of 2025—questions of empire, kingship, authority, nation, and history. However, these are not the only social institutions and processes affecting our individual and collective agency. More specific features of our present-day world—such as social relationships in the neoliberal workplace, governed as it is by data-led performance management, or the role of a stratified mass education system in an unequal society—also play significant roles in structuring our subjectivity. Fantasy can only even begin to address such contexts, however, if set fully in the contemporary world in the manner of the fourth novel on this year’s shortlist, Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent.
My initial response to hearing that The Incandescent was to be set in a posh boarding school for magic users was to question why Tesh would want to do that. It transpired that one reason was that, as a teacher herself, she wanted to tell this story from that perspective. This intrigued me because, although my own teaching career was mostly spent at universities, I am also a qualified secondary school teacher. So, I bought the book when it came out and found myself swept away by Tesh’s fascinating depiction of teaching and education management—to the extent that I didn’t actually pay that much attention to the magic or the romance and later had to reread it to get the full effect of the novel. The strength of the novel, therefore, is that, as Liz Bourke identifies in her review for Locus, it “marries the energy and verve and peril of the best of the fantasy genre with the understated, literary examination of interior and professional lives.” This dual nature does also mean that the book is more liable to appeal to those who have at least some experience of those kinds of professional and educational backgrounds, beyond the simple fact of having been to school themselves. Nevertheless, for those who do have that experience, the effect of the novel is a revelation and leads me to wonder to what extent this type of contemporary fantasy might be particularly suited to showing readers aspects of modern life that are not so apparent in other genres of writing.
Tesh’s main protagonist is Dr Sapphire (Saffy) Walden, D.Thau, M.Ed, Director of Magic, who we first see late at night filling in a risk assessment form for the next day’s A-level Invocation practical class. We are told this is typical behaviour: “it wasn’t that she didn’t believe in work-life balance. It was just that her career was her life” (p. 5). What I found most striking about the portrait of Saffy we are given in the opening chapters of the novel is that her combination of expertise, love for the job, and sense of duty permits her no doubt in either herself or the system she serves: “Chetwood was hers and she belonged here, in this place where she did good and meaningful and interesting work every day of her life” (p. 54). In my experience, this is exactly how good education professionals often come to internalise ideological values that structure inequality, despite an unwavering belief in teaching everyone to the best of their ability. To be clear, we are supposed to realise that something is amiss in Saffy’s attitude—because The Incandescent is partly a story about how its main character comes to realise their faults and eventually becomes a better, more rounded person. But it’s not the conventional version of this story. Saffy’s mistake is not to overrate her own power and capability; her mistake is to think that, because she is more powerful than almost anyone else, she must also be cleverer than them. It is to have staked her “personal and professional identity entirely on being fantastically clever” (p. 346). Although parts of the plot of The Incandescent could easily be fitted into a mainstream novel, it’s the fantasy element that makes clear to us this distinction of where Saffy is at fault.
The Incandescent is not the familiar tale of someone’s struggle to empower themselves and become an agent within their own life. Rather, it’s the story of a confident bisexual woman learning how to use her agency and power ethically. The reason that Saffy can fill in a risk assessment form without repeatedly smacking her head into her desk at the pointlessness of the exercise—and fill in the mitigation box with the single word “ME” (p. 11)—is that she can access the power of the demonic plane: She knows how to bargain with demons. One of the key establishing sequences in the novel is when she peer-observes a colleague’s lesson on magical ethics. Following an extensive discussion of when it’s permissible to use magic on a person, which boils down to the principle of consent, the question shifts to whether demons, which come from a plane on which the only relationship in play is that between predators and prey, are persons. The answer—crucially for the resolution to the novel—is no, but they are similar in one respect: They are capable of making contracts in the same way as humans and this is the source of their attraction to magicians. “What we offer to demons, as magicians,” we read, “are slices of physical reality, something which has enormous value to them. And what they offer us is power” (p. 69). What Saffy learns the hard way over the course of the novel—through reaping the consequences of a sequence of spectacularly bad decisions—is not that making these bargains is wrong but rather the importance of properly understanding the true nature of the mutual obligations that bargains entail, whether with other people or demons. What saves her are the bargains she has made with other persons, such as her students and love-interest Marshall Laura Kenning, who do properly understand such mutual obligations. The moral of the story is not to reject the transactional nature of the world but to embrace it fully.
The Incandescent is in its own particular ways an exceptional genre novel and certainly good enough to win the Hugo. But will it? Tesh is the second writer on this year’s shortlist who has already won the award—in 2024 for Some Desperate Glory—and so she has name recognition. However, the 2024 WorldCon was in Glasgow and therefore the number of UK voters, who might favor Tesh, would have been proportionately higher than in a US WorldCon year such as 2026, even after one takes online membership into account. Furthermore, Some Desperate Glory was not only unabashed SF but also a breathtakingly high-octane and high-concept novel. In comparison, The Incandescent, although equally intense and not without its own share of thrills, is a more morally complex and reflective work and might not attract the same level of support. While weight of numbers on the shortlist suggests that there is a good chance a fantasy novel will gain the award this year, will a contemporary urban fantasy beat out works that bear more resemblance to traditional epic fantasies? I wouldn’t rule it out altogether, but my instinct is that The Incandescent probably won’t win.
Four books down and the casual reader of this review might be wondering by now if there are any SF novels on this year’s Hugo shortlist at all? The answer is yes: We have Adrian Tchaikovsky’s first-contact novel Shroud. Tchaikovsky, of course, originally made his name as a fantasy writer, but his first SF novel, Children of Time (2015), won the Clarke Award in 2016, at exactly the right time for him to become a player in the paradigm shift to SFF. Since then, Tchaikovsky has become a publishing phenomenon known not just for his prolific output—at least sixteen novels in the 2020s alone by my count—but also for the quality of his work, which has been widely shortlisted for a range of awards. In Hugo terms, the Children of Time series (three volumes at that point of time) won the award for Best Series in 2023, and he has been shortlisted for Best Novella a couple of times. He was first shortlisted for the Best Novel Award last year with not one but two novels: Service Model and Alien Clay (both 2024). The latter of these was also a first-contact novel, but there is no connection to Shroud other than the fact that there is a contrasting aspect to the setup of the two novels that invites comparison. In Alien Clay, the humans that are making contact are from a totalitarian Earth controlled by the “Mandate,” whereas in Shroud the imagined future Earth is governed by the “Concerns,” an extreme projection of today’s neoliberal tech corporations. The temptation is to think that Tchaikovsky is stress-testing various dystopian political systems, but as he explains in this interview with The Fantasy Hive, he begins with the setting and then writes the story to best demonstrate it in action: “This is particularly true in Shroud, where the starter concept was to work up a really alien world, with that particular life form and its curious capabilities. Once that’s done, the setting generally suggests the story as the best means of showcasing the world I’ve created.”
Once upon a time in an imaginary golden age, an SF story might have used an incredibly hostile world, such as that in Shroud, as the backdrop against which to showcase human cooperation and engineering ingenuity. Here, Tchaikovsky completely reverses this approach. In part, as he notes in the interview, this is to show that “life under the Concerns is exactly why you don’t give over your space programme to techbro billionaires.” This is a message that will resonate with many of the Hugo electorate and may well gain him some votes. However, there is also a darker side to the novel. Despite the satire on neoliberal corporations, the two women who get stranded on Shroud—in an improvised vehicle with legs—show incredible ingenuity and cooperation to traverse impossible terrain for a one-in-a-million shot at surviving. Yet at the same time, they nonetheless misinterpret just about everything that happens around them. In other words, on another level to the corporate satire plot, Shroud also tells a cosmic joke at the expense of the habitual human trait of imagining that we are the source of meaning in the universe. Like the best horror stories, this novel ruthlessly decentres any residual dregs of the liberal ideals of humanism that in the twentieth century we used to pretend to uphold. In this respect, there is a thematic similarity to The Incandescent, with both novels employing an encounter with a space—respectively the demonic plane and the surface of Shroud—characterised entirely by the struggle of predators and prey in order to demonstrate the consequences of protagonists misunderstanding the transactional nature of reality.
As it happens, I don’t think the kind of Muskism represented by the Concerns will prevail. If we ever get into space beyond the Solar System, it’s far more likely to be through some revised version of Communism. This is a position that perhaps makes me something of a starry-eyed optimist in contrast to the implied worldview of Shroud and other of Tchaikovsky’s novels. I enjoyed Children of Time as much as anyone, but that is because we all identified with the (female) spiders; the humans in that novel are just as much the victims of a cosmic joke as the ones in Shroud, only things work out better for them in that scenario. Or do they? Although I was initially reading Shroud as more overt horror than Children of Time and struggled a bit with the opening setup phase of the novel, I did perversely start to enjoy it much more from two hundred pages in. Then, another one hundred and fifty pages further on, I read the following passage in “Interlude Five” and realised that there was a good reason I’d started enjoying the book: “Let me put this into words you can understand. The great illusion of mind is its singularity. The lie that it originates from some inalienable and solitary point. The self. The soul. On Earth, mind arises from the interactions of millions of neurons, deceiving the organism into believing that it thinks” (p. 346). It’s not the critique of bourgeois individualism that I would make, but it’s a critique nonetheless and it’s also the confirmation that something philosophically interesting is going on in this novel.
In the above interview, Tchaikovsky notes that this middle part of the novel, which combines the human survival story with trying to show how the alien functions, “was very complex to plan out.” It certainly pays off and works as a very skilful piece of narrative composition, precisely in the way that it maintains the central ambiguity of whether we should read Shroud as horror or something completely different. This balance extends perfectly up until the final words of the novel. After finishing, I was left wondering whether the novel wasn’t in fact a planetary romance and that final scene actually the consummation of a love story? As in The Incandescent, a contract has clearly been made and the open-ended question remains as to how the resultant mutual obligations will play out.
Shroud is a deceptively clever book and it demonstrates once again that Tchaikovsky is a writer worthy of winning the Hugo Award for Best Novel. Nevertheless, I don’t think this will be his year because, for all its productive ambiguity, Shroud is still probably going to be too bleak for a significant portion of the voters. The problem is that, once we reject the prospect of a technically advanced utopia because we hate “techbro billionaires,” it immediately becomes difficult to project any optimistic science fictional future. Even my former enthusiasm for the works of Iain M. Banks has been impacted by the tendency of Musk and Bezos to cite them as an inspiration. Our present is already dystopian; hence the attraction of turning to the past for fantasy explorations of the underpinnings of the nation state. If only there was a way to incorporate all of these frustrations—SF’s apparent complicity with the tech corporations leading to a stalled future—into concerns that could be registered by a metafictional novel which nonetheless was still able to give voice to a belief in something beyond the present? Surely that novel would be a shoo-in for the Hugo shortlist and possibly the award as well?
That novel does exist and occupies the sixth and final spot on the Hugo shortlist. Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author has already won the 2026 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel ahead of Shroud. The title is taken from a famous 1967 critical essay by Roland Barthes, which elaborates on the ideas of earlier critics that the author’s intentions should not be central to critical consideration of a literary work. It does so by advocating instead for a reader-centered approach to interpretation: “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.” Okorafor, who has a PhD in English and is an academic, has said in an interview that she doesn’t think that “it’s possible” to separate work and author. Nevertheless, her novel plays cleverly on the idea by centering a disabled Nigerian American writer, Zelunjo (Zelu) Onyenezi-Onyedele, who is clearly a fictionalised version of herself, and interspersing chapters throughout from Zelu’s bestselling SF novel, Rusted Robots. This text-within-the-text is set in a future in which humanity is on the final verge of dying out and being replaced by sentient machines, such as the AIs Ankara and Ijele. In this manner, both our current moment—Okorafor’s depiction of which includes plotlines featuring social media, driverless cars, and tech billionaires—is brought together with our increasingly gloomy propensity to view humanity as doomed. But what is the relationship between these two literary devices, the fictional author and the novel within a novel?
The last chapter of Death of the Author is from Rusted Robots and is called “Death of the Author by Ankara.” I wouldn’t call this a twist ending because, appropriately enough for a novel with this title, Okorafor leaves a lot up to us as to how we want to read her book. However, the in-text logic of this chapter is that Ankara is the author of the novel we have just finished reading. This section is effectively her acknowledgments, in which she describes how she came to invent the character of Zelu and explains the title choice: “I liked this title because our authors, the humans, have died off. But we have remained. We are their stories” (p. 433). This is not just a neat little loop to tie the novel up nicely; it also rearranges what we have just read for us. It means that Rusted Robots can be seen as the framing narrative surrounding the story of Zelu, which is the compelling central story. It also retroactively explains the narrative choices of key moments in Zelu’s life—experiencing independence through the use of the first driverless taxis, being fitted with an exo-skeleton which allows her to walk, and finally going into space at the invitation of the tech-billionaire Jack Preston—as progressive steps leading to the subsequent replacement of humans with robots. Likewise, the disapproval and lack of support voiced by most of her family towards Zelu at each of these stages becomes recast as an indicative human resistance to the robot future, which she literally comes to embody.
According to its Wikipedia page, the novel was originally sold to the publisher with the title “The Africanfuturist.” In a 2019 blog post, Okorafor defined africanfuturism in distinction to Afrofuturism as a sub-category of SF that “is concerned with visions of the future, is interested in technology, leaves the Earth, skews optimistic, is centered on and predominantly written by people of African descent (black people) and it is rooted first and foremost in Africa.” The future robots have African names and live in former Nigeria. Zelu gets very upset when the film adaptation of Rusted Robots changes the location to the US and the bots’ names to Yankee and Dot. To be clear, Death of the Author is not projecting an American future and the novel includes a bitter epitaph for its corporate culture: “In the last days of humanity, humans cultivated a growing disdain for their own soul. Many didn’t believe in the sanctity of the creative process anymore” (p. 433). In contrast, Zelu is shown as someone who repeatedly pays the price required to be creative.
In the real acknowledgments section of Death of the Author, Okorafor notes that she has wanted to write this book since she “started writing novels thirty years ago” but it has taken her “a long time to be ready” (p. 437). It certainly reads like a novel that takes the experiences of a lifetime and distils them into a fictional form which helps readers make sense symbolically of our past, present, and future. Therefore, while the novel is perfectly readable in and of itself, it has a fuller effect if the reader is familiar with who Okorafor is, and has read at least some of her other work. This makes sense as a writing strategy at a historical moment when the creative process is under sustained assault by the big American AI companies. Okorafor is correct that under these circumstances we can’t afford critical paradigms that separate the author from her work. Death of the Author, then, is an audacious metafictional work of literature that is very much in contention to win this award.
Over the course of the 2020s, which already feel like a very long decade, I have sometimes worried that the Hugo shortlists have shown signs of the tide ebbing out after the high-water mark of the Jemisin years and their immediate aftermath. The truth is, though, that the times have been so weird and relatively unprecedented—with the pandemic years followed by Trump’s re-election and the assault on queer rights, immigrants, and universities in both the US and the UK—that it’s very difficult to get any solid sense of trends and patterns in Anglo-American genre fiction. Carefully reading and thinking about this year’s shortlist has been a rewardingly enjoyable and uplifting experience. Perhaps surprisingly so, given that if one could distil their overall message into a single diagnosis, it would probably be that human society—our political structures and entire categories of individual behaviour—need to be radically reconfigured if we are to fulfil the aim set out by Jemisin in 2018: of finding a world where all of us can live. But, then, I think it’s long been realised in certain quarters that everything needs to change. What’s happening is that the rest of us are catching up.
So, who’s going to win? The first thing to say is these are six good books. There’s nothing on this list that I would hesitate to recommend to someone on the basis of their taste. However, I’m not sure how many people who weren’t specifically reading this shortlist would otherwise read or even want to read all six of these novels. The collective field of SFF brings together an increasingly wide range of subgenres. I think we can expect to see even more diverse shortlists over the coming years. The problem with this is that many people’s favourite book on the list is increasingly going to intersect with their preferred type or types of books. There is a danger that the winner is determined by what turns out to be the most popular subgenre on the list. Maybe this has always happened and one could argue that it’s fair enough: The Hugo comes down to a popular vote and what wins wins. However, it complicates the process of trying to write a commentary on the shortlist. For example, I could argue at this point that I think there has been a trend to SFF-mystery crossovers in recent years and that therefore the most likely winners are The Raven Scholar or A Drop of Corruption. Or it could be SFF-Romance that proves most popular, meaning that The Incandescent or The Everlasting are the key contenders.
Moving beyond the popularity question, however, as I’ve tried to indicate in the reviews—and much as I personally love The Incandescent—I think there are two novels here that stand out in terms of their ambition and execution: Death of the Author and The Everlasting, both already award winners this year. These books combine sophisticated metafictional and/or metanarrative approaches. Both of them are not just telling a story but explicitly expressing an understanding of how genre fiction functions and how it impacts the real world. I found it almost impossible to choose between them, but on reflection I think the award should go to Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author as the stunning highpoint of an amazing career to date.