The Best Sci-Fi & Fantasy Novels, as Chosen by Fans: the 2026 Hugo Awards

The Hugo is a fan-chosen award, voted on by members of the World Science Fiction Society. Notably, every choice this year was also selected by readers of Locus Mag to appear on another major award list, the Locus Awards. So there is considerable consensus this year. The list is also crammed with previous award-winners, so it’s set to be a high-quality field this year.

Last year’s Hugo went to the The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett, and this year the sequel is a finalist: A Drop of Corruption. The series are mystery books, set in a damp and dangerous secondary world. If you haven’t yet read the first, you can now rest assured you are starting a series that continues to deliver. Expect a sparkling, caustic detective; a solid sidekick in the Watson vein, but with magically augmented memory; and a rich, lushly developed world.

This installation begins with a classic locked room mystery, but the stakes are political and high. Jackson Bennett talked to Crime Reads about combining the high-politics expectations of fantasy with the law-and-order expectations of a murder mystery: in these books, “the meat of the story lies… not in magical mass destruction, but in what we do to each other when we feel the rules are getting fuzzy, and what steps we have to take to reassert the law—and why.”

The second book on the list has the distinction of being nominated for the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Locus awards this year, and has already won the NAACP Image Award for Fiction and the Libby Award for Science Fiction. Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor tells the story of Zelu, a writer facing a low in her career, until she writes a smash-hit science fiction novel that transforms her life. There is much in the novel that is autobiographical: Okorafor writes of the experience of being Nigerian American and of disability.

Woven throughout are the chapters of Zelu’s breakthrough novel, Rusted Robots, set in a human-less future. Okorafor told BookPage, “I feel like one of the things about this book that’s going to be interesting is this question of ‘What is it?’ Because it’s so much.” It draws on her education in mainstream fiction and her career in SFF to deliver both. Kirkus describes it as “All-out Okorafor – her best yet.”

Adrian Tchaikovsky is up next, the 2023 winner of the Hugo Best Series Award for The Children of Time. He was nominated last year for Alien Clay, in which alien life was modular and group-minded in a way that bends our human understanding; he returns here with another intensely alien world in Shroud.

Tchaikovsky told Fantasy Hive, “For Shroud I wanted to get away from Earth life as much as possible.” So he crash-lands two members of a profiteering crew on a moon which is lightless, high-gravity, high-pressure, zero-oxygen and highly radioactive… and then introduces the dominant species. Writing for Locus Mag, Alexandra Pierce describes the result as “an epic first-contact novel… delivers one of the most intriguing visions of alien/human interaction that I’ve read in many years.”

Fourth on the list is Alix E. Harrow’s The Everlasting. A scholar obsessed with a legendary lady-knight finds himself travelling back in time to meet her, but learns that the two of them are fated to retell their story again and again. This time, they want to rewrite the ending. Discussing her inspiration, Harrow told Shereads that “the romantic medieval image of the knight can’t survive contact with a history degree. This book is a product of the tension between knights as they existed in my childhood imagination (noble, loyal, heroic, hot), and knights as they actually were (violent enforcers of state power, deployed later as propaganda).”

The book has been lavishly praised, described by Voice Mag as “a richly imagined triumph of storytelling,” and by Strange Horizons as “a beautiful novel that will reward reading and rereading.”

Emily Tesh won the 2024 Hugo, and alongside Okorafor is nominated for Hugo, Nebula and Locus this year. The Incandescent takes place at a school teaching magic to adolescents – but this time it is the teacher who stars as the protagonist. She must fill out risk assessments and prepare for university applications, all while keeping students safe from a ravenous demonic realm.

Tesh is a teacher herself. She told Locus Mag, “I had all these staff-room jokes stored up, I had all this observational comedy that I finally had somewhere to put.” So we can expect humour, dark academia, and an innovative re-examination of the well-worn magic school trope.

Finally, Antonia Hodgson has an award-winning record for her historical mysteries, but makes her fantasy debut with The Raven Scholar. Seven contenders compete, in legitimate fashion, for a throne. Along the way, one of them is murdered. Our protagonist must find out who, and see justice done – but she has also been named the replacement seventh contender. Enough to keep anyone busy, so it’s no wonder this comes in at nearly 700 pages.

This doorstopper has been glowingly reviewed – Paste Magazine describes it as “a story that, if there’s any justice, will end up on everyone’s best-of lists come the end of the year,” and Reactor Mag as “compulsively readable.” One to lose yourself inside.