Arrow

Created by Greg Berlanti, Marc Guggenheim, and Andrew Kreisberg

Pretty actor-like performers

I’m going to try to keep this short, since I don’t enjoy writing negative reviews.

A month or so ago I watched Season 2 (currently the last released) of Daredevil Born Again—an excellent TV show, in my opinion. That finished, I went on to the next Marvel TV show that I hadn’t yet seen, Spider-Noir, which was considerably less impressive. Spider-Noir is on Prime Video, and when I finished it, Prime recommended Arrow. I was pleased to see that Arrow had run for eight seasons. I took that as a good sign, first, because no show runs for eight seasons unless a lot of people enjoy it, and second because I thought it would keep me entertained for a long time. I am writing this review after watching the entire first season. I don’t intend to watch any more.

The first thing that struck me about Arrow, in contrast to Marvel TV shows, was that the stars had clearly been chosen because they were pretty people. Say what you like about Vincent D’Onofrio (who plays Kingpin in Daredevil), he is not a pretty person, not when wearing a fat suit. A very good actor, but not pretty. Nor, in my opinion, is Nicolas Cage, or even Deborah Ann Woll, as she appears in the last episodes of Daredevil Born Again. Charlie Cox (who plays Matt Murdock/Daredevil)), is, I will grant you, a good-looking guy. He’s also one Hell of an actor.

Arrow stars Stephen Arnell as Oliver Queen. He’s a good-looking, buff (and often shirtless), and absurdly carefully groomed man, who apparently calibrates the length of his stubble to the micron. He can’t act. He does occasionally try—you can see him trying—but he just can’t do it. Katie Cassidy as his love interest Laurel Lance is another very pretty person, who shows no real sign of being able to act.

I don’t want to be completely unfair to Arrow—it is not devoid of acting. Some of the minor characters are not bad. I’m thinking particularly of Paul Blackthorne (who plays Laurel’s father Quentin Lance), and Emily Bett Rickards, who plays tech geek Felicity Smoak with understated humor.

But it is 100% clear when you watch Arrow that “pretty” was the thing they were looking for in their actors.

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Arrow on IMDB

2026 Hugo Short Story finalists

Here are the finalists for the 2026 Best Short Story Hugo Award, with my rankings:

1. ★★★☆☆ 10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days, Samantha Mills
2. ★★★☆☆ Six People to Revise You, J. R. Dawson
3. ★★★☆☆ Wire Mother, Isabel J. Kim
4. ★★★☆☆ Missing Helen, Tia Tashiro
5. ★★★☆☆ Laser Eyes Ain't Everything, Effie Seiberg
6. ★★☆☆☆ In My Country, Thomas Ha

I apologize: I'm gonna do a half-assed job of reviewing these. It was, IMO, a lack-luster harvest. What I always hope for when I read the Hugo finalists is something that makes me say, "I sure am glad the Hugo nomination process pointed me at that story!" This year, 2026, that happened in the series, novel, novella, and novelette categories. It didn't happened for a short story. (I have not yet read the poetry finalists -- the only remaining category in which I plan to vote.)

I have one complaint for all the short stories: they aren't. Stories that is. They are written English documents that have the form of stories, but not the essence. Everyone knows the famous but unhelpful dictum from Aristotle's Poetics that a story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end (usefully modified by Jean Luc Godard, "not necessarily in that order") Unhelpful though Aristotle is, the point on which he fails to put his finger is a good one: a story has a structure, not just of words, but also of events and emotions. I would summarize it as, "a problem should be resolved."

It's not that that doesn't happen in any of these stories -- it's just that it feels perfunctory, as if that isn't what the story is about. Several of them are more like thinly disguised polemics than stories. I'd put Six People to Revise You, Laser Eyes Ain't Everything, Wire Mother, and probably In My Country in that category. ("Probably" because I didn't understand In My Country.) Missing Helen was more storyish, but it was just not, IMO, a very good story.

10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days is a series of ten very short stories about a Lovecraftian end to the world. So there was some story-ness to it, quite possibly more than I understood. Also, it was funny. I chuckled several times.

So, there you have it. Better luck next year!

Goodreads review

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The Millay Illusion

Sarah Pinsker

A magical story with no actual magic

The finalists for the 2026 Best Novelette Hugo Award are:

★★★★☆ Kaiju Agonistes by Scott Lynch
★★★☆☆ Never Eaten Vegetables by H.H. Pak
★★★★☆ Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy, by Martha Wells
★★★☆☆ The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For by Cameron Reed
★★★★★ The Millay Illusion by Sarah Pinsker
★★★★☆ When He Calls Your Name by Catherynne M. Valente

Sarah Pinsker's The Millay Illusion easily tops my ranking for best novelette. It appeared in Uncanny 67 -- Here is a direct link. Some people have pointed out, and I agree 100%, that it is puzzling The Millay Illusion is even eligible for a Hugo at all, for this reason -- it is not Fantasy or Science Fiction or any other type of speculative fiction.

To be sure, the story is all about magic. But it is about the kind of pulling-rabbits-out-of-hats, sawing-ladies-in-two magic that we all know is not true magic, but merely skilled consensual deception. In fact, our first-person narrator, Lottie, who goes by the stage name Johnny Chess, is herself an adept. She makes it clear that Susanna Miller/Millay's tricks are exactly that type of deception. Susanna is merely exceptionally good at it.

But genre policing is dumb and never gets you anywhere useful. If the Hugo Award Committee fell for Pinsker's sleight-of-hand, even while totally aware that they were reading a story about sleight-of-hand, I'm not gonna second guess them. And even less because it's a really good story.

It is set in a time where women could not be stage magicians. They could be props that proper male magicians used in their tricks, but they could not, themselves, openly do magic on stage. Thus Lottie's "Johnny Chess" pseudonym. There's definitely a "backwards and in heels" element to the story. [spoiler1]

So, that's it for the novelettes. Here are my rankings:

1. ★★★★★ The Millay Illusion by Sarah Pinsker
2. ★★★★☆ Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy, by Martha Wells
3. ★★★★☆ Kaiju Agonistes by Scott Lynch
4. ★★★★☆ When He Calls Your Name by Catherynne M. Valente
5. ★★★☆☆ Never Eaten Vegetables by H.H. Pak
6. ★★★☆☆ The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For by Cameron Reed

On to the Short Stories!

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The Millay Illusion in Uncanny Issue Sixty-seven

Goodreads review

The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For

Cameron Reed

Dystopian love story

The finalists for the 2026 Best Novelette Hugo Award are:

★★★★☆ Kaiju Agonistes by Scott Lynch
★★★☆☆ Never Eaten Vegetables by H.H. Pak
★★★★☆ Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy, by Martha Wells
★★★☆☆ The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For by Cameron Reed
☆☆☆☆☆ The Millay Illusion by Sarah Pinsker
★★★★☆ When He Calls Your Name by Catherynne M. Valente

The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For is a love story. It takes place in a future dystopia, in which corporations rule the world (more overtly than they now do). There is cloning in this Brave New World, and custom bodies, and mind transfer from body to body. Of course, things go wrong and it turns into an adventure.

I didn't love it, but I didn't hate it. Three stars seems fair.

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Goodreads review

Never Eaten Vegetables

HH Pak

Eventually very good, but a little too late

The finalists for the 2026 Best Novelette Hugo Award are:

★★★★☆ Kaiju Agonistes by Scott Lynch
★★★☆☆ Never Eaten Vegetables by H.H. Pak
★★★★☆ Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy, by Martha Wells
☆☆☆☆☆ The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For by Cameron Reed
☆☆☆☆☆ The Millay Illusion by Sarah Pinsker
★★★★☆ When He Calls Your Name by Catherynne M. Valente

H.H. Pak's Never Eaten Vegetables is a story about an interstellar generation ship whose people face a terrible dilemma. It was published in Clarkesworld Issue 220. Here is a direct link.

The ship is NEV-476, originally meant to stand for "Natal Embryonic Vessel-476". Its cargo is ten thousand fertilized embryos held in stasis. They are to be released from stasis and grow to become babies when the ship arrives at its destination. There's a malfunction, and things become very, very difficult. As a consequence, the ship refuses the name "Natal Embryonic Vessel" and instead says its name is "Never Eaten Vegetables."

The story, as I eventually understood it, was a good one, even a very good one. The problem, though -- the reason for my lackluster rating, was that it took me a long time to understand what the Hell was going on and who these people were. I mean, I get the impulse to set up and preserve the mystery. In fact, I usually expect Speculative Fiction to be confusing, and am disappointed if I understand fully on the first read. But in this case the mystery was so successfully opaqued for so long that I spent about half my reading time completely baffled.

All does eventually become clear. I will probably re-read, and I expect I'll enjoy it more on the second reading. But right now, after just one reading, I am more annoyed than amused. You might call my three-star rating unfair. Indeed, I might call it unfair. But I'm sticking with it for now.

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Never Eaten Vegetables in Clarkesworld Issue 120

Goodreads review

When He Calls Your Name

Catherynne M. Valente

A creepy backwoods story

The finalists for the 2026 Best Novelette Hugo Award are:

★★★★☆ Kaiju Agonistes by Scott Lynch
☆☆☆☆☆ Never Eaten Vegetables by H.H. Pak
★★★★☆ Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy, by Martha Wells
☆☆☆☆☆ The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For by Cameron Reed
☆☆☆☆☆ The Millay Illusion by Sarah Pinsker
★★★★☆ When He Calls Your Name by Catherynne M. Valente

Cat Valente makes her readers work. She writes dense, elaborate prose in which every word counts. I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, the pay-off is worth the effort. Indeed, I often feel that the pay-off is greater, for the simple reason that I have worked for it. On the other, it's exhausting. I can't read two Valente novels back-to-back. (I except her Fairyland books, which, being aimed at kids, are lighter reads.) I tell you truly and without exaggeration, I have read mathematics textbooks with less effort than Valente's most demanding novels. Palimpsest just about killed me.

When He Calls Your Name is a novelette, so it doesn't have space to reach math textbook levels of mental strain. It's a good story, perhaps a little less original than I usually expect of Valente, and I enjoyed it.

You can find it here, and an author interview here.

[spoiler1]

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When He Calls Your Name in Uncanny Magazine Issue Sixty-Five

Author interview

Goodreads review

Kaiju Agonistes

Scott Lynch

The Kaiju Effect is the opposite of the Butterfly Effect

The finalists for the 2026 Best Novelette Hugo Award are:

★★★★☆ Kaiju Agonistes by Scott Lynch
☆☆☆☆☆ Never Eaten Vegetables by H.H. Pak
★★★★☆ Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy, by Martha Wells
☆☆☆☆☆ The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For by Cameron Reed
☆☆☆☆☆ The Millay Illusion by Sarah Pinsker
☆☆☆☆☆ When He Calls Your Name by Catherynne M. Valente

Rapport is the story to beat in this category, because (Duh...) Murderbot.

Kaiju Agonistes appeared in Uncanny Magazine Issue Sixty-Two. Here is a direct link to the story. Also see the Author interview.

Kaiju Agonistes is a deeply unserious work of alternative historical fiction, and i thoroughly enjoyed it. True, I have an advantage most readers will not -- I lived through most of the years covered. It is true that my memories of 1954 are vague, since I was born in 1955.

Lynch's story appears to be based on a hypothesis that I'm going to call the Kaiju Effect, which is a sort of opposites version of the Butterfly Effect. The Butterfly effect is based on the mathematical principle that chaotic systems (like the weather, and history) show extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. If you make even the smallest change in a chaotic system, then, in a relatively short time the consequences become large and unpredictable. Thus, as an example, the movement of a butterfly's wing in Brazil may result in a hurricane in Florida a month later. Or it may result in a hurricane not forming.

The Kaiju Effect is that huge changes have very little effect on the overall trajectory of history. The huge change that Lynch makes to history is the introduction of a Kaiju. It does the kinds of things you expect a Kaiju to do: wandering around, destroying cities, shrugging off every military attempt to fight it. What really strikes me about the alt history of Kaiju Agonistes is how similar it is to the real history I lived through in the years from 1955 through 1984. Names like Dwight Eisenhower through Richard Milhouse Nixon appear in the same places in Kaiju Agonistes as in real history, doing much the same things they used to do.

So yeah, that was fun. I recommend it, Rapport still has it beat in my book, but not by much.

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Kaiju Agonistes in Uncanny

Goodreads review

Cinder House

Freya Marske

Cinderella as a ghost

Here are the finalists for the 2026 Best Novella Hugo Award.

★★★☆☆ Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz
★★★★☆ Cinder House by Freya Marske
★★★☆☆ Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite
★★★☆☆ The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar
★★★☆☆ The Summer War by Naomi Novik
★★★★☆ What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher

Ding! Ding! Ding! Folks, we have a winner!

Freya Marske's Cinder House is a Cinderella retelling. Ella is more a Disney Cinderella than Grimms Aschenputtel. But she is something quite original. In this retelling Ella is dead, a ghost haunting the house in which her stepmother and stepsisters live. In Marske's version of haunting (at least in this story), the haunt is tied to the building being haunted. Thus the title Cinder House. One consequence is that Ella can't leave the confines of the house. The only people who can see her are the inhabitants of that house, meaning Ella's stepmother and stepsisters, who are -- surprise, surprise -- not kind.

Ella wants nothing more than to escape the house. As well as ghosts, there are fairies and sorcerers in this world. Ella manages to contact some of these magical people. The story follows somewhat familiar lines -- the ball, the glass slippers, the prince. If you have read other works of Marske's, you will not be surprised to hear that there are spicy ("explicitly sexual") bits. I have reached the age where descriptions of moist bits rubbing against other moist bits just bore me -- could we please get back to the story? -- but they were not excessive here.

Cinder House easily wins my nomination for 2026 Best Novella. The crop this year was lackluster -- even Kingfisher's What Stalks the Deep disappointed me a bit. Cinder House did not disappoint. This was a good book, and I'm glad the Hugo awards led me to it.

And now, on to the novelettes!

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Goodreads review

Automatic Noodle

Annalee Newitz

Legends and Lattes with robots

Here are the finalists for the 2026 Best Novella Hugo Award.

★★★☆☆ Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz
☆☆☆☆☆ Cinder House by Freya Marske
★★★☆☆ Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite
★★★☆☆ The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar
★★★☆☆ The Summer War by Naomi Novik
★★★★☆ What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher

Cozy goes bot! Cozy goes post-apocalypse! Weirdest of all, Automatic Noodle is cozy without any mention of tea.

California fought a revolution against the USA and kinda won. That means California is now an independent nation, and the USA is its enemy. Robots fought in the revolution. What’s more,

A clause in the futuristic nation’s new Constitution gave civil rights to human-equivalent embodied intelligence, or HEEI, an acronym that humans pronounced “hee-eye.”

Our four main characters are HEEI bots running a food preparation service. When the action starts, their corporate owner has absconded to the USA, leaving the enterprise and the bots on the edge of financial collapse. This is a dire problem for the bots, as they don’t own themselves and may be repossessed if they can’t keep up with their loan payments.

They decide to try running the business themselves, and to do it by making actually good food, as opposed to the slop their previous owner had them pumping out. Hands, their cook, settles on biang biang noodles as their product. At first, this works out well.

But there are serpents in paradise. It turns out -- surprise, surprise -- that some humans are prejudiced against bots. Their business, Authentic Noodles, is reviewed-bombed, and when their mean rating drops below 3 stars, they are on the verge of failure. Will they recover? What do you think?

I’m really not the target audience for this. I’m not a foodie at all. I utterly lack the capacity to be excited by noodles. Furthermore, I have never really been enchanted with the wave of “cozy” that has flooded literature recently. In the end this felt to me so much like a Legends & Lattes remake that I was left feeling “Been there, done that.” YMMV.

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Goodreads review

The River Has Roots

Amal El-Mohtar

A pretty fairy tale

Here are the finalists for the 2026 Best Novella Hugo Award.

☆☆☆☆☆ Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz
☆☆☆☆☆ Cinder House by Freya Marske
★★★☆☆ Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite
★★★☆☆ The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar
★★★☆☆ The Summer War by Naomi Novik
★★★★☆ What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher

Amal El-Mohtar's The River Has Roots is written in a lush style.

Now, cards on the table: when I say someone's style is "lush," what I really mean is that I don't like it, and am trying to be polite. As a general rule, I don't like the kind of writing that never stops letting off fireworks. I care a lot about style, but l mostly like the style I don't notice. Although there are rare exceptions (Guy Gavriel Kay and GennaRose Nethercott come to mind), a flowery style feels performative. I want writing that doesn't ask for applause, but just gets out of my way and tells the bloody story.

Pardon me for the throat-clearing. I told you that so that you could discount my lukewarm review if you enjoy a lush style.

That said, there is a rather nice classic fairy love story told here, if you can look through the performative style. In the end I enjoyed it.

The novella The River Has Roots is followed by a second story, "John Hollowback and the Witch," which was an ugly, nasty little thing. I didn't like it at all.

El-Mohtar is a co-author of an epistolary novella, This Is How You Lose the Time War which has been all over my Goodreads feed for years. It swept the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and BSFA novella awards in 2019 and 2020. I have resisted the temptation to read it. Based on The River Has Roots, I think I will continue to resist.

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Goodreads review

Murder by Memory

Olivia Waite

A generation ship that transports stored memories

Here are the finalists for the 2026 Best Novella Hugo Award.

☆☆☆☆☆ Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz
☆☆☆☆☆ Cinder House by Freya Marske
★★★☆☆ Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite
☆☆☆☆☆ The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar
★★★☆☆ The Summer War by Naomi Novik
★★★★☆ What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher

Here's the set-up: our hero, Dorothy Gentleman, is a passenger on a generation-ship named Fairweather, nicknamed Ferrie. On this generation ship bodies get old and die. However, each person has a book, stored in the Library, and this book records their mental state at times of their choosing. When a person's body dies, a new body is fabricated and their memories are restored from their Library book. Obviously, in such an environment murder -- i.e. killing a person's body -- is not all that big a deal.

(I'm not sure how having children works. Dorothy has a nephew Rutherford (Ruthie), which means her sister had a son, which means that reproduction can happen, somehow, although I'm not sure if that happened during or before the voyage. This matter is presumably explored in book 2, Nobody's Baby.)

Dorothy is the ship's detective. It's her job to investigate crimes. The story begins with her waking up in a strange body. This is not a thing that it is ever supposed to happen. It transpires that someone has just been murdered, and Ferrie wants an investigation, so she has re-instantiated Dorothy from the Library into a body.

The crime has a lot of moving parts, and I had trouble wrapping my mind around the eventual solution of the mystery. I think we were supposed to be impressed by the novelty of the strangeness of murders in an environment where everyone has a backup, so that murder is a mere temporary inconvenience. It's all very "Cozy Mystery" coded -- yes, there is tea, as well as coffee (no cats, however).

This might have worked, except that many years ago I read the story The Phantom of Kansas by John Varley, based on the same hook, but in an entirely different environment. Also, I'm not a yuge fan of the whole "cozy mystery" phenom.

The upshot is that I was not deeply impressed. I did, however, enjoy it enough that I plan to continue reading the Dorothy Gentleman series.

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Goodreads review

Firebreak

Craig Schaefer

Elmer and Shaddock vs the Castaways

Firebreak is the second novel in Craig Schaefer's Castaways series. In his Afterword, Schaefer tells us that he plans five books. Three of them are published, the last, Rats, in 2026. So, keep that in mind if you dislike being left hanging in a series -- it'll likely be a couple years before you can read the whole. This is made more frustrating by Schaefer's love of finishing a book with essentially every important question left hanging.

The background: The action takes place at a magic school called Saunders Academy. This is a shoestring school: it seems to have five professors and one cook. Students are expected to pitch in to take care of janitorial duties, maintenance, etc. Not to mention security, which is a big deal. We started book 1, Castaways with a group of misfit kids being transported to Saunders. They come from different universes, but one of them, Amy Nettle, is from our version of Earth. She is the main point-of-view character. This group of kids call themselves the Castaways.

Saunders more or less represents the forces of commerce and civilization -- but they would say that, wouldn't they? There is a Shadowy Evil Organization called the Network that wants to destroy everything.

Castaways ended with two Network operatives, Elmer and Shaddock, infiltrating the island on which Sanders is located. They got away and are now squirreled away in the wilderness of the island, presumably plotting evil. In particular, they have plans to reveal the secret location of the Academy to the Network. This would obviously be bad. The story mainly concerns efforts by the Castaways and the professors to thwart Elmer and Shaddock. In addition, we have the typical sort of drama of a school book. There's teenage relationship drama, as well as the recruitment of various Castaways to the elite student cliques called the septs.

It's all competently done, action-packed, and fun. I will continue reading the series.

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Goodreads review

Let Sirens Sing Your Name

Seanan McGuire

Fun little intro to isekai

“Let Sirens Sing Your Name” is Seanan McGuire’s June, 2026 Patreon reward. She introduces it as follows,

(Image: Two cats, a large caliby Maine Coon and a smaller sealpoint Ragdoll, on an orange background. The Maine Coon has her paw around the Ragdoll’s neck and is grooming him. He looks pleased.)

This month, we’re taking a brief detour into stand-alone isekai--not portal fantasy--with the story of what it means to seek forever. Please enjoy.

What is isekai? The name is Japanese 異世界—meaning different world or other world. Here’s the Wikipedia page. There was a little discussion of this matter in the comments on McGuire’s Patreon page. Here’s what the story’s narrator has to say,

You can’t grow up in America in the twentieth century and not know portal fantasy. It’s everywhere, from Alice and her rabbit hole to half the characters in network cartoons. But it always has a portal. There’s a door, or a tornado, or something. It doesn’t just happen.

No, the word for the kind of journey I’d had was harder to find, and when I found it, it wasn’t written in English. Isekai. Those stories didn’t have portals. They had objects or summonings, like the sextant, or they had deaths. The results were the same. Passage to another place. It’s a Japanese word. It literally means “other world,”

McGuire writes in a comment on her Patreon page,

…part of why I wanted to write this was to explore that difference a little bit. Portal fantasies have portals—doorways, passages, physical barriers—and isekai generally don't.

Thus, according to her, the distinction between portal fantasy and 異世界 is the essentially trivial matter of whether there is an actual door between worlds, or the passage occurs in some other manner. According to Wikipedia 異世界 derives from the folktale Urashima Tarō (浦島 太郎), who is a kind of Japanese Rip Van Winkle or Oisín.

Whatever, it’s a charming little story of travel between our world and a fantasy world. I enjoyed it, even though I’m not fully buying McGuire’s explanation of 異世界.

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Shroud

Adrian Tchaikovsky

That was extraordinarily painful

Here are the finalists for the 2026 Best Novel Hugo:

★★★★★ A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett
★★★☆☆ Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor
★★☆☆☆ Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky
★★★★★ The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow
★★★★☆ The Incandescent by Emily Tesh
★★★★★ The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson

Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shroud was the last novel finalist I read this year. Despite his obvious talent, I have found that Tchaikovsky disappoints more often than he pleases. In my opinion, he tries far too hard to teach. He does this at the expense of story-telling. Shroud is the least enjoyable thing by Tchaikovsky I have read. It is, in fact, high up on the list of all-time painful reads.

It's a post-apocalyptic novel. The apocalypses are called the first bottleneck and the Second Bottleneck. As the names suggest, these were apocalypses of the environmental/resource variety. Humanity survived by diaspora -- spreading to other star systems that still have resources to be extracted, and by corporate slavery. Everyone is a slave of the Concern. It is not called "slavery" -- slavery seldom is. There's always a euphemism.

Our first-person narrator, Juna Ceelander, is a member of a team of half a dozen specialists. They are tasked with the job of working out how to exploit Shroud, their name for a moon of a gas-giant that orbits a star distant from Sol. Shroud is extremely inhospitable. It has an atmosphere that is essentially opaque, and therefore everything is dark, hence the name. Juna and her colleague Mai Ste Etienne crash-land on Shroud. Most of the novel recounts their long, painfully long, very painfully long odyssey across the surface of Shroud to a point from which they hope they can be rescued. Throughout this journey they are in pain, injured, in despair, and drugged to the gills. This was really, really hard to read.

There is, as it happens life on Shroud. [spoiler1]

Here's my ranking of this year's novel finalists:

1. The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson
2. A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett
3. The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow
4. The Incandescent by Emily Tesh
5. Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor
6. Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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Goodreads review

The Incandescent

Emily Tesh

A very long vignette about English boarding school

Here are the finalists for the 2026 Best Novel Hugo:

★★★★★ A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett
★★★☆☆ Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor
☆☆☆☆☆ Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky
★★★★★ The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow
★★★★☆ The Incandescent by Emily Tesh
★★★★★ The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson

Emily Tesh‘s The Incandescent takes its title from a poem by the incandescent Ogden Nash.

Tarkington, Thou Should’st Be Living in This Hour

O Adolescence, O Adolescense,
I wince before thine incandescence.
Thy constitution young and hearty
Is too much for this aged party.

Our protagonist, Sapphire Walden, helpfully quotes the first two lines -- otherwise I would have been at a loss to understand the title. Walden is not, for most of the book, one of those adolescents. She is the Director of Magic at Chetwood School, an English boarding school. She is, however, an Old Girl, which in the jargon of English boarding schools means “former student.”

The Incandescent is obviously a fantasy, because “Magic.” But for me personally, English boarding schools are as much a fantasy world as Tolkien‘s Middle-Earth, from Stalky & Co and Jennings through Hogwarts. I was educated in US public schools. Private boarding schools exist in the USA, but none of my acquaintance attended one, that I know of. Annual house point competitions are less real to me than Quidditch. Tesh is a former classics teacher at a well-known English private school (Haberdashers’ Girls School).

The Incandescent felt to me like a very long vignette portraying an English private boarding school, as painted by a highly placed insider. The magic was only marginally relevant. OK, that is misleading. There is a plot -- several actually -- and the plot is all about the magic. It’s not a very coherent plot. There are several distinct stories, connected only by the location (they’re mostly about Chetwood School) and by Walden’s involvement in them. It’s very stop-and-start.

I was puzzled by the title at first, because I read The Incandescent as singular, and there are a lot of incandescent adolescents (including young Saffy Walden). But then I thought to myself, “What wrong with you? You’re a native English speaker, and English doesn’t inflect adjectives. ‘The Incandescent’ can be plural as easily as singular.”

In the end, although I enjoyed The Incandescent, it didn’t feel like a novel to me. It will, I think, be #4 in my ranking of the Hugo finalists. (I haven’t read Shroud yet.)

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Goodreads review

Death of the Author

Nnedi Okorafor

Friction, friction, friction

Here are the finalists for the 2026 Best Novel Hugo Award:

★★★★★ A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett
★★★☆☆ Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor
☆☆☆☆☆ Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky
★★★★★ The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow
☆☆☆☆☆ The Incandescent by Emily Tesh
★★★★★ The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson

Neuroscientists and psychologists who study it will tell you that reading is a profoundly unnatural activity, one that the brains of our ancestors schlepping around the plains of Africa were not adapted for. It is therefore not surprising that so many children find it hard to learn to read. Now, if you're reading this review, it is likely that you have trained yourself to read so well that it feels natural to you.

Yet, I'll bet that every now and then you read a book that reminds you that reading is unnatural, a book that feels like hard work to read. Sadly, for me Nnedi Okorafor's novels are all like that. I can admire them intellectually -- I can say to myself as I read, "Well, that's clever... That was well done..." What I cannot do is enjoy them. It's not a thing I'm proud of. It is better to be a person who enjoys books than one who doesn't, and I think I have a talent for enjoying books -- I can read almost anything with pleasure. Okorafor defeats me.

The protagonist, Zelu, (Zelunjo Onyenezi-Oyedele) is a paraplegic Naijamerican (Nigerian-American) author. She has written a novel that she was unable to get published. She makes a little money as an adjunct professor, but she's a lousy teacher and gets fired just as the novel begins. She has an abrasive personality. She belongs to a large Naijamerican family who get angry with her whenever she fails to follow the constrained script they have written for her, as a disabled person. (Nigerian attitudes towards disabled persons, which the novel explores, are not kind.)

Then, just when her life is at its worst, she writes a science fiction novel, something she had never thought of doing before. It is a huge success. A movie is, made, and she becomes wealthy. Other ostensibly interesting things happen to her, which, to avoid spoiling, I will not describe. All through this narrative Okorafor lobs in hints, subtle as mortar rounds, that Zelu's tale is going to culminate in some remarkable way. (The title, by the way, refers to a famous essay on literary criticism by Roland Barthes and not necessarily to the literal death of this particular author.)

Now, I can love a character who is objectively unloveable. I am very fond of Holden Caulfield, even though he's a liar and a creep and would be personally unendurable. I cannot love Zelu, or her family. My life would be brighter if they had never cast their shadows on me. It was a struggle to force myself to keep reading about these people and their repeated foolish, foolish behavior. As usual with Okorafor, there is much here that I can admire intellectually. But I would have had more fun reading an accounting textbook. (Not hyperbole.)

I can't recommend this one at all.

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Goodreads review

Spider-Noir

Created by Oren Uziel

Do you like cheesy Nicolas Cage?

Spider-Noir is an eight-episode miniseries on Amazon Prime Video. It is set in an alternate universe within the Sony's Spider-Man Universe (SSU) franchise. (That’s a quote from the Wikipedia page.)

What you think of it will probably depend on a lot on what you think of Nicolas Cage. I understand there are people who think Cage is a unique talent. Rumor has it that Nicolas Cage is one of those people1. I am not.

Cage plays Ben Reilly, a private detective in depression and prohibition-era New York. Ben got his spider powers in World War I after an encounter with some men being experimented on by Germans. (This sounds more like World War II than I to me, but historical accuracy is not what we’re going for here.) The principle villain is a crime boss called Silvermane (Finbar “Finn” Byrne), who feels a lot to me like the more familiar Kingpin.

The first word that came to my mind to describe Cage’s performance was “cheesy.” I had to think about it a bit to figure out what I meant by that. And I think it is this: Cage is not pretending to be a 1930s era detective. He is pretending to be an actor portraying a 1930s detective in the movies. That is, there is a an extra layer of artificiality in Cage’s performance. This is deliberate, as eventually becomes clear.

Some of that same extra artificiality shows up in other aspects of Cage’s performance. Occasionally Ben Reilly moves in what Cage apparently believes to be a spider-like way. This was especially cheesy.

Well, I did not love it. I didn’t hate it, either. Overall I enjoyed it.

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The Raven Scholar

Antonia Hodgson

Murder mystery and palace intrigue

Here are the finalists for the 2026 Best Novel Hugo Award:

★★★★★ A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett
☆☆☆☆☆ Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor
☆☆☆☆☆ Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky
★★★★★ The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow
☆☆☆☆☆ The Incandescent by Emily Tesh
★★★★★ The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson

I had already read two of them, A Drop of Corruption and The Everlasting, and given them both 5-star ratings. Of the four remaining, one was by an author I had not before read, The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson. So, neophile that I am, I grabbed that one to read next.

It was a good choice. The Raven Scholar is now my top vote for the Best Novel Hugo.

It's a murder mystery, or it contains one. It takes place mostly on Imperial Island, where there are eight palaces devoted to the eight gods of Orrun -- Fox, Raven, Tiger, Ox, Bear, Monkey, Hound, and Dragon. The current emperor, Bersun, is finishing his 24-year term, and the trials are about to start for the next emperor. The trials are a series of competitions administered by the seven palaces (of the Eight gods, not including Dragon). Each palace selects a contender, who, if he/she wins, will become emperor.

Our protagonist, Neema Kraa, is a Raven scholar. She is the High Scholar in the Raven Palace, but she is not chosen as the Raven contender. Neema is a common woman; snobbery is not unknown to Imperial Island; and they choose instead Neema's more aristocratic frenemy Gaida.

Then, the night before the Festival trials are to begin, Gaida is murdered. Bersun chooses Neema to (1) investigate the murder, and (2) serve as Raven contender. Neema of course thinks what you're thinking right now, "What? Both at the same time?" If you're getting the impression that Bersun is not super invested in Neema's success at either task, well yeah, the same idea occurs to her.

But she persists! She is aided by the Raven, her god she doesn't believe in. Neema and you will get to know the Raven well. Indeed, the story is told in the first-person by the Raven, although that will not at first be evident.

The mystery is very well done. Hodgson, it turns out, is the successful author of the Thomas Hawkins mystery series. She is not new to mystery writing, and it shows. As always in the best Fantasy and Science Fiction mysteries, the murder mystery is wrapped up in the, to the reader, mysterious nature of the world in which it takes place, and the investigation is used for world discovery. Unsurprisingly, the murder is connected to the Imperial succession competition.

So that was all very interesting and exciting.

Also, I enjoyed Hodgson's sense of humor. She's never really laugh-out-loud funny, but definitely chuckle-under-your breath funny. Hodgson has made the Raven a little absurd. Neema is also aware of her own faults and able to laugh at them.

The Raven Scholar is disappointing in one way. It is the first novel in the planned Eternal Path trilogy. As of 31-May-2026, the next two novels are not yet available. The second, The Fox in Winter, is scheduled for release 5-Oct-2027. It'll be a long wait.

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Goodreads review

Tales of the Elders of Ireland

Ann Dooley (Translator), Harry Roe (Translator)

Let us all praise Dear Leader Patrick

Early in its history, Ireland had a problem that many peoples have had, deriving from limited land and primogeniture. If you’re a Big Man (women need not apply) with enough land to support your family and soldiers (we will come to why you need soldiers presently), you need to avoid dividing that land. A fertile man is likely to have more than one son. (Polygamy was a thing.) You cannot pass your land on to all of them. The practice was to hand it down to the oldest son.

What do you do with the spares? Well, in early Ireland (and other places) many of these young men joined bands of brigands. In Ireland the brigands were called Fianna. They hunted, raided the cattle of propertied folks (hence the need for soldiers), hired themselves out as mercenaries. (And got themselves killed, pretty often.) The oldest Irish folklore concerns the Fianna. If you doubt the hold that the Fianna have on Irish imagination, note the name of the current (May-2026) largest Irish political party. Of course, Fianna Fáil would object to my use of the word “brigands” to describe the legendary Fianna, but they would, I suspect, wink while objecting.

I don’t think the time of the Fianna can be precisely dated, but generally they were civilized and suppressed by the Christian church. Thus the conversion of Ireland by Patrick (ca. 387 - 461 CE) can be taken as the approximate end of the Fianna.

The longest written work of Fianna folklore that has come down to us is Acallam na Senórach, “Colloquy of the Ancients,” of which Tales of the Elders of Ireland is a translation. Acallam na Senórach dates from the late 12th or early 13th centuries. You will notice that the 12th century was a long, long time after Patrick. You would be justified in doubting how authentic a report of those legends it can possible be.

It gets worse! The Church obviously had issues with the Fianna, of which polygamy, thievery and murder were near the top. Acallam na Senórach is a propaganda tract that takes the point of view that, while these stories are all very interesting, it is a Very Good Thing that the church has now triumphed.

Acallam na Senórach purports to be a series of stories told to Patrick by Caílte mac Rónáin, one of the most prominent of the Fianna, after Caílte’s conversion to Christianity by Patrick. Caílte was a nephew of the last and most famous of the chieftains of the Fianna, Fionn mac Cumhaill (whom you may have heard of as Finn Mac Cool). In general Caílte wanders around Ireland, and whenever he comes to a new place, someone (most often Patrick) asks him why this place is named what it is. And Caílte tells the story of that place. Some of these stories are good, but most are repetitive pastiches of boasting of the prowess of the Fianna.

Also, Patrick is a terrible person. For instance, here is an early story

Priests went off to Becan’s house and Benen asked him for lodging for Patrick. Becan had eight score milch-herds, and yet he refused them an evening meal. Benen and the clerics then returned and told their tale to Patrick. Patrick said, ‘Let not one of his livestock or of his household survive until tomorrow.’ This indeed happened, just as Patrick said.

Patrick is the dictator of Ireland. He expects and receives extravagant, North Korean dictator-level, praise -- he grants earthly wealth and heavenly bliss to those who praise him, and death and damnation to those who fail of obsequious obedience. I cannot believe that the modern Roman Catholic Church would approve this account of Patrick.

Thus, Tales of the Elders of Ireland was more of a disappointment than a pleasure. Also, I need to mention an extraordinary gap: there is no index. Since the book is not available in electronic format, good luck if you want to find anything!

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Goodreads review

Ben Aaronovitch

Where too much love of mystery novels may lead

Ben Aaronovitch’s moments are usually not Aristotelian beginning-middle-end stories, but rather vignettes that offer more insight into the history and characters of the Rivers of London novels. I am quite fond of Ben’s Moments. This is a good one. I hope it introduces the coming Rivers of London novel. Since it appeared in an email blast announcing that he has just delivered the first draft (no title mentioned), this seems like a good guess.

This one begins when a Lady (with a capital ‘L,' he emphasizes) shows up in the office of Barnaby Dennis Applebaum, Private Inquiries. The Lady doesn’t speak, but she carries a fox who introduces herself as Polly Anna and the Lady as Foxglove.

Rivers of London readers will find little surprising in this event. We know who Foxglove is, we know she is mute, and we could not be less surprised to learn that she is in communication with talking foxes. You will not be terribly surprised to learn that Foxglove wishes Applebaum to find her lost sisters. {Spoiler1]

You can read it free on the web. That is probably not a permalink, but it’s the best I have.

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Moment 17 – The Lady and the Fox, Bloomsbury 2024