2026 Hugo Award Nominees: This Download Could Have Been A Link.

Voting for this year's Hugo Awards opened this week - for anyone interested, the full list of finalists can be found at:

https://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/2026-hugo-awards/ 

Along with the list of nominees, the Hugo Awards Packet was also made available to voting members.  It's an impressive 17.7 GB download, a surprisingly large number considering that none of the Long or Short Form Dramatic Presentation nominees have included full copies of their selections, although Frankenstein has been generous enough to include a screener link and password.  Sadly, Best Novel nominees Robert Jackson Bennett for A Drop of Corruption, and Adrian Tchaikovsky for Shroud, also chose not to include full copies of their novels, as did Naomi Novik for her Best Novella entry, The Summer War*.  However, it's gratifying to see that, in addition to the ePub versions of their work, many of the other nominees have elected to add audio versions as well.

Looking over the nominees, I was a bit surprised by the Long Form selections - or rather, by the options that didn't make the list. The Long Form nominees are: 

• Andor (Season 2)
• Frankenstein 
• KPop Demon Hunters 
• Mickey 17 
• Sinners
• Superman 

I thought Bugonia might get a nod - and doesn't Weapons have a supernatural element?.  None of the Marvel options of Thunderbolts*, Fantastic Four, or Captain America: Brave New World made the cut, and the latest chapter in the Avatar series was also shut out. And, if the door is opened to entire seasons by the inclusion of the second season of Andor, it's surprising that the Season One of Murderbot didn't receive a nomination, given its popularity - especially considering that two Murderbot episodes are nominated in the Short Form category, and a third episode was withdrawn by the showrunners to comply with the episode limit for the category.**  Why not just put the whole season in for Long Form?  Or Pluribus, which is also structured as a single long narrative but only represented by a single entry in the Short Form list, as is Severance?  

In contrast, I'm fine with Doctor Who only having one nominated episode rather than the whole season, given its episodic nature and the varying list of writers, but Pluribus is very much Vince Gilligan's baby and could logically be treated as a single body of work.  (Interestingly, Andor is the product of four writers, which would seem to make it a better candidate for single episode consideration.)

All of this fails to answer the question of why the download is so large?  As it turns out, the Related Work category, which cover non-fiction work related to the genre, contains an epic 4.66 GB episode from The History of Westeros podcast - slightly ironically, given that unlike the Long Form entries, the episode is also available for free on YouTube.   

- Sid

* I appreciate that authors are concerned with uncontrolled distribution of their work, but honestly, that ship has already sailed - if any of these pieces are available in digital form, I guarantee you that they're already being downloaded for free. 

** There's also a nominated Murderbot novelette from Martha Wells, which I'm looking forward to reading, regardless of whether it gets my vote.

"And so it begins..."

Happy New Year, Revolutionaries!  January 1st is traditionally a day in which people take a moment to evaluate their lives and consider areas of improvement as they recover from New Year's Eve, and I thought I'd take a moment and look at the last year.

Considering that I'm retired, I have to confess that I had a slow year in terms of fandom.  If anything, it was sub-par in terms of things like catching up on reading, making inroads into my TV viewing backlog, or continuing with book cataloguing.  Instead, my first year of retirement was pleasantly restful: naps, daily walks, leisurely cups of tea, and a lot of time watching YouTube™ - as well as a brief flirtation with Duolingo, which ended after three months when I finally accepted that the free version wasn't teaching me anything I hadn't learned from Mrs. Wood in high school French class. 

That being said, I also attended Worldcon in 2025, which stands out as the peak of my life as a science fiction fan.  I had a great Space Marine VR experience, we paid an enjoyable pre-boycott visit to Disneyland (and by extension Galaxy's Edge, which I love), I saw some good SF movies, like Thunderbolts, Mickey 17, Fantastic Four, Superman*, and Tron: Ares*, and made a casual start on Season Two of Andor and Season One of Pluribus, both of which are excellent.

And now it's 2026, and I feel that it's time to get back in the groove.  As such, my New Year's resolution is to read a book a week, watch an hour of TV a day, and do one blog posting a week, as well as finally finishing up my long-running book catalogue project, which is currently dead in the water at "Rowley".  As with any resolution, I can't promise that I'll stay the course for the entire year, but at least it gives me a place to start.

A happy New Year to anyone reading this, and I wish you good luck with whatever resolutions you may choose to undertake for 2026! 

- Sid

* To be honest, I went against the current on these two.  I didn't really love Superman, and I quite enjoyed Tron: Ares. 

The Infinite Mickey.

Karli and I attended a matinee show of Mickey 17 this weekend, and I think she summarized our reaction well: if you're curious about the film, by all means go, but if you're on the fence, don't bother.

Why the mixed recommendation?  Mickey 17 is undeniably an interesting movie with a satisfying conclusion, the performances are good right across the board - Robert Pattinson in particular does a notably excellent job as the Mickeys, and Mark Ruffalo's colony leader Kenneth Marshall savagely channels Donald Trump at his worst  - but somehow, it fails to break through into brilliance. 

For anyone unfamiliar with the premise, Mickey Barnes is an affable if misguided loser, suffering from longterm guilt over his perceived responsibility for his mother's death in a car accident.

Hoping to escape from a loan shark with a fetishistic interest in brutally punishing borrowers who get behind on their payments, Mickey and his exploitive friend Timo (an epically underutilized Steven Yeun) attempt to get seats on the next interstellar colonization ship leaving Earth. Timo manages to bluff his way into a shuttle pilot job, but Mickey, lacking in any kind of skills or talents, unwittingly signs up to be an Expendable without reading any of the small print. 

As an Expendable, Mickey's body is scanned and his memories recorded so that a duplicate Mickey can be created every time he dies in the line of duty - and he dies a lot. He is callously treated as completely disposable, being used as a living guinea pig for the effects of solar radiation, and as a test subject for dangerous allergens (and fatally experimental iterations of possible vaccines) on Niflheim, the new colony planet.

His only solace is his girlfriend Nasha, played by Naomi Ackie.  Nasha is a member of the mission's security team, and the only person on the ship who treats him like a human being. 

Things change for the 17th Mickey when he is reported as dead and an 18th Mickey is printed*, when in fact Mickey 17 has been saved from an icy death by Niflheim's grublike indigenous species, the Creepers. Co-existing duplicates are forbidden by law, and both Mickeys are now under a death sentence as the colony goes to war with the Creepers.

The original concept isn't unique - I can think of three or four different novels that feature disposable duplicates, with the Cuckoo Saga series by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson being the closest in spirit to Mickey 17 in that the tachyon duplicates in their stories are tasked with terminal assignments. 

Without giving away too much, I would have ended the story differently.**  The movie returns Mickey's individuality at the end, whereas I would have had him embrace his multiplicity: in my version, Mickey would use the duplication technology to create hundreds of Mickeys - an army of Mickeys, if you will - who unite to defeat Marshall and his loyalists and bring stability and equality to the colony.

The final scenes would show Mickeys everywhere, a valued part of the settlement and a key part of its now-peaceful relationship with the Creepers.  The film would end with a small group of Mickeys in white lab coats observing the scientist most cruel in his treatment of earlier Mickeys, as he nervously explores an unstable icy catacomb under their supervision - what goes around, comes around.

 - Sid

* One of the running gags in the film is that each replacement copy of Mickey is literally printed, using a machine that deliberately evokes the jerky rhythm of early dot-matrix printers.

** Is there a technical term for the opposite of a spoiler - ie, telling people something that didn't happen in a movie? 

Because really, how hard is it to come up with ten ways to kill someone?

I'm looking forward to seeing Mickey 17, the new film by Oscar-winning South Korean director Bong Joon Ho. (Genre fans will know Bong as the director of The Host and Snowpiercer.  Everyone else will know him from Parasite.)

For readers unfamiliar with the film's premise, the titular Mickey is an Expendable, a human guinea pig who dies repeatedly as part of an interstellar colonization project, whose brain is recorded and imprinted onto a new copy of his body, death after death after death...until one time when the previous Mickey isn't actually dead yet.  Hijinks ensue, as they say.

However, I was a little confused by the title, given that the script is based on a 2022 novel by Edward Ashton titled Mickey 7*.  

When questioned on this unexpected alteration, Bong provided a very simple explanation:

I killed him 10 more times, that’s why we changed it.

Well, there you go, asked and answered.  Moving on...

 - Sid

* But not a lot confused - after all, Bladerunner is the title of a complete different novel than the one that the film is based on.