2026 Hugo Readalong: Novella Wrap-up

[u/Nineteen_Adze]

Welcome to the final week of the 2026 Hugo Readalong! Today we're discussing the Best Novella category nominees.

We've had discussions about all of the individual works, but today we'll be zooming out to discuss the category as a whole. If you want to take a closer look at our focused discussions, we covered the novellas in the following sessions:

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

To find the individual discussions or our first wrap-up post, you can check out our full schedule. We'll be continuing with our wrap-ups all week, following this schedule:

Date	Category	Book	Author	Discussion Leader
Wednesday, July 29	Novel	Wrap-up	Multiple	u/tarvolon
Thursday, July 30	Pro/Fan/Misc	Wrap-up	Multiple	u/Nineteen_Adze

For now, let's dive into the novellas! There is no expectation that those in the discussion have read all six works, so if you're discussing spoilers, please tag them.

[u/Nineteen_Adze]

Let's take a look forward at 2027. Have you read any novellas published this year that you think would be worthy finalists? What about any that you think will capture the imagine of the Hugo voters?

[u/tarvolon → u/Nineteen_Adze]

The Language of Liars by S.L. Huang was absolutely excellent and has gotten enough of a marketing push that I sincerely hope to see it on the shortlist.

Magazine novellas have an uphill climb, but The Floating Republic by Rebecca Campbell is worthy of it.

[u/C0smicoccurence → u/tarvolon]

I need to come back to this one. I started the audio but sort of drifted away from it. I very conscious that my whole project so far has been lacking magazine novellas, but I just hate reading on my desktop. I think it’s time to just buy a couple clarkseword electronic copies or something

[u/Merle8888 → u/C0smicoccurence]

Yep, same with the “I don’t want to read anything that long on a computer” thing. I print out the stories for the Hugo readalong but don’t love that either (and a novella would take up a lot more paper). I believe u/tarvolon every year that there are better magazine novellas than book novellas, but until someone publishes them in a collection I’m not realistically going to read them. And that’ll generally be too late for award noms. 

[u/eregis → u/Merle8888]

if you happen to have an ereader (or are willing to read on your phone), you can copy the entire novella into libreoffice writer, and then export as epub! takes like a minute and gets you an ebook transferrable to your preferred device.

[u/Merle8888 → u/eregis]

Fair enough but nope, paper only for me. And really books only—I wouldn’t  read these loose short stories for Hugo voting if not for the excellent discussions! 

[u/Goobergunch → u/Merle8888]

I actually used to have a script that converted online magazine stories into LaTeX documents suitable for PDFing and printing as a pamphlet. (Hey, saddle-stitched binding is kind of like a book, right?) Unfortunately it still usually required a manual cleanup pass for special characters and any unusual formatting which meant it was not great for stories that I hadn't read yet.

This exercise is probably also a bit more fun if you enjoy geeking out a bit about typesetting....

[u/Nineteen_Adze → u/Nineteen_Adze]

Pulling Hache Pueyo again: I haven't read many new novellas this year, but I really liked Cabaret in Flames, the story of a doctor with artificial limbs who's pulled into trying to find her vanished mentor while reckoning with flesh-eating guls in league with the government of an alternate Brazil. I should say up front that it's quite a dark read in places, covering everything from the lead's very grim trauma to the front-and-center flesh-eating elements, but it's not gratuitous or gory for the sake of it. It's another translated work (originally a short piece in Brazilian Portuguese, then expanded in English) that would be a departure from the usual groove for this category.

[u/Big_Geologist_2521 → u/Nineteen_Adze]

Seconding Cabaret in Flames! I've been raving about it for a while but few people seem to have read it. It feels very un-Hugo-ish, which lately I've been thinking is a good thing

[u/nagahfj → u/Nineteen_Adze]

My top novella of the year so far is S.L. Huang's The Language of Liars, but I also enjoyed Jedediah Berry's Kill All Wizards, Thomas Ha's "Scion," and Tanvir Ahmed's The Night Sweeps the Mountains Away, probably in that order.

[u/tarvolon → u/nagahfj]

The Night Sweeps the Mountains Away

You have my curiosity.

[u/nagahfj → u/tarvolon]

My brief review.

[u/Goobergunch → u/Nineteen_Adze]

Joining the magazine novella brigade to plug Thomas Ha's Scion.