The winners of the 2026 Hugo Awards were announced last night or rather very early in the morning at LACon V, the 2026 Worldcon in Anaheim, California. My thoughts on the finalists may be found here and the full voting and nomination statistics and some comments by the administrator may be found here.
I didn’t attend Worldcon this year, because the US government has unfortunately gone even more mad and the risk of being refused entry to the US or – worse – getting thrown into some ICE jail is too big, especially since Worldcon already falls into the gray area between business and leisure travel for me. What is more, travelling to Anaheim would likely also have been very expensive, considering people talked about Uber (i.e. not even a proper taxi) rides from Los Angeles airport to Anaheim costing more than a hundred dollars, horrendous parking fees, etc… Though I participated virtually and will eventually write a con report about my virtual LACon experience.
Before we get to the Hugos, let’s take a look at the other important election the results of which were announced at Worldcon, namely the results of the site selection vote for the 2028 Worldcon. There’s also a video of the 2026 site selection business meeting here, complete with site selection administrator Tim Szczesuil trying and in at least one case failing to read out the write-in votes. The bid for Brisbane in Queensland, Australia, won and has now been rebranded as Aussiecon 5. This was not exactly a surprise, since the competing bids for Kigali in Rwanda and Nuremberg in Germany both dropped out some time ago. Nonetheless, this result makes me happy, since I am part of the Brisbane bid committee and promoted the bid at the 2026 Eastercon and Eurocon.
Since the Hugo ceremony was so very late at night or rather very early in the morning, I did not watch it live. A recording of the 2026 Hugo ceremony may be found here and I will probably watch it eventually, though it is three hours and fifteen minutes long. However, the people who did watch the whole ceremony, whether online or on site in Anaheim, generally were full of praise for the ceremony, toastmaster Ursula Vernon, who entertained the audience with fabulous hats and fascinating biological facts and for the acceptance speeches.
There were some issues, because no Hugo ceremony is without issues. One issue was that the autocaptioning software used throughout the con is still pretty terrible and turned Hugo finalist Effie Seiberg into “Every Cyborg”, which Effie actually found quite funny. Though I suspect the moderator who introduced their “fellow panelists”, only for the autocaptioning software to claim they introduced for “fallow penis” probably found the whole thing less funny.
A more serious issue was that some of the slides listing the finalists contained mistakes. This was most notable in the Best Fan Writer category, where the slide somehow mashed finalists James Davis Nicoll and Roseanna Pendlebury together, creating Frankenstein’s Hugo finalists James Davis, Nicoll Roseanna (who became her own character and a joke in the Hugo finalist Discord as an annoying and bitchy person) and Pendlebury, while finalist Örjan Westin was reduced to Örjan Wes. There really is no excuse for this sort of thing happening, especially since “Someone screwed up the names of Hugo finalists – again” keeps happening over and over.
Finally, Best Poem finalist Mari Ness, who happens to be a wheelchair user, reported that a volunteer at the Hugo ceremony told her that “backstage is only for walking participants”. We all know that the world, including convention centers and hotels, is not always as accessible as it should be. However, such remarks are completely inacceptable and LACon owed Mari an apology.
So let’s get to the individual categories.
Warning: I will discuss the voting and nomination statistics, so if you don’t want to know this (cause I know that quite a few finalists don’t), then consider yourself warned. Continue reading
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