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The winners of the 2026 Hugo Awards—one of science fiction and fantasy’s most prestigious awards, decided by popular vote of all eligible WorldCon members—were presented this weekend at the 84th World Science Fiction Convention in sunny Los Angeles, CA. A hearty congratulations to all of the winners (which include one of Lit Hub’s favorite books of 2025!) as well as all of the finalists and nominated works! What a time to be a genre reader!

Here are the winners in the major literary categories:

Best Novel: The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow (Tor Books)

Best Novella: The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar (Tordotcom)

Best Novelette: “Never Eaten Vegetables” by H.H. Pak (Clarkesworld, Jan 2025)

Best Short Story: “In My Country” by Thomas Ha (Clarkesworld, April 2025)

Best Series: Old Man’s War by John Scalzi (Tor Books)

Best Graphic Story or Comic: A Wizard of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel by Ursula K. Le Guin, adapted and art by Fred Fordham (Clarion)

Best Related Work: Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer (University of Chicago Press)

Best Poem: “Hex Supply Customer Support Log” by Elias Montgomery (Strange Horizons, 25 August 2025)

Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book: Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe by C.B. Lee (Feiwel & Friends)

Astounding Award for Best New Writer: Antonia Hodgson

You can read the full list of winners and finalists via Locus here. 

 Read More  Synopsis: A government ban on a book is an assault on intellectual freedom. But what happens when the censor moves inside the publishing house? 

Read More TODAY: In 1919, Amrita Pritam is born. 

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Kurt Vonnegut describes the train arriving in Dresden at five o’clock that afternoon: “The boxcar doors were opened, and the doorways framed the loveliest city that most of the Americans had ever seen. The skyline was intricate and voluptuous and enchanted and absurd. It looked like a Sunday school picture of Heaven to Billy Pilgrim.” Dresden was, indeed, a beautiful city, a cultural and artistic center often called a jewel box. And it is true as well that Dresden remained remarkably intact compared to other large German cities. The theater and opera house were open. All eighteen of the city’s cinemas were showing films that winter. Restaurants and shops were busy. Yet, the notion that Dresden was an open city, off limits to bombing, or, as Vonnegut writes in the novel, that “it had not suffered so much as a cracked windowpane” was not accurate.

The notion of Dresden as an “innocent” city, devoted strictly to culture and the arts…is a myth.

Everyday Dresdeners were not protected from the war or free from its effects. They had witnessed and often eagerly participated in the fierce anti-Semitism that infected the rest of the country; 90 percent of the Jewish-Polish population of Dresden were arrested in October of 1938 and dumped over the border into Poland. Since that time, almost all of the city’s remaining Jews had been sent to work or extermination camps, and orders had just arrived for Jews that were married to “Aryans” or who had Aryan parents to report for transit. War refugees, who had been crowding into the city for years, did not let Dresdeners forget the dire circumstances elsewhere in Germany. Initially arriving from the west, from cities like Hamburg and Berlin that had already been bombed by the Allies, even more refugees poured in from the east in late 1944 and early 1945.

They came from the neighboring province of Silesia and from Poland, ahead of the advancing Soviet Army. From the new arrivals, Dresdeners heard the harrowing tales of mass rapes, murders, and atrocities perpetrated by Russian soldiers eager for revenge. With no more room for the burgeoning influx, at least six thousand of the city’s refugees were housed at the central railway station, which would be devastated in the Allied firebombing. The city was also brimming with foreign workers living in camps in and around Dresden, who had been brought in to work on the railways since so many German men were off fighting. In October 1944, the draft age in Germany was lowered to sixteen and raised to fifty, taking even more men, sometimes fathers and sons together, away from their families.

Nor had the crowded city escaped bombing altogether. In the months leading up to the February attack, Dresden had already been damaged by scattered, small-scale American daylight raids. In October 1944, a small group of American “Hell’s Angels” dropped bombs on railway marshaling yards in the city, with a few going astray and landing on schools and neighborhoods. The raid killed 270 people. Another small raid on January 16, 1945, by 144 American B-24 Liberator aircraft, which could fly further and faster than B-17s, damaged a four-mile area and killed 376 Dresdeners. This last bombing, in fact, created work for some of the recently arrived American POWS of the 106th Division. While Vonnegut toiled in a malt syrup factory, several other prisoners were assigned to labor details clearing out the rubble left behind from the bombings.

The notion of Dresden as an “innocent” city, devoted strictly to culture and the arts, whose factories manufactured mostly porcelain figurines and dinnerware along with other luxury goods, such as cigarettes, cameras, sewing machines, and bicycles, is a myth as well. Almost all of these factories had been converted to support the war effort. Cigarette-making machines were adapted to produce bullets. Companies that made camera lenses focused on creating better, more accurate bomb sights. Radio, bicycle, and sewing machine makers produced precision machine tools key to war technology. Even a famous artist’s colony and school in the northern part of the city had ceased making furniture and crafts, instead building wooden tail assemblies for planes as metal became scarce. The colony’s well-known Festival Hall had become an SS barracks. By 1944, Dresden contained at least one hundred and twenty-seven factories that manufactured war material, and most Dresdeners were employed in war work or armaments factories.

The American prisoners exiting the boxcars on January 12 did not see this hidden part of Dresden. Like Billy Pilgrim in the novel, they glimpsed what seemed like heaven—a charming, picturesque city, filled with parks, monuments, and cobblestone streets that seemed remarkably free from the awful pain and suffering they had witnessed during the Bulge, their freezing forced march to Gerolstein, and their harrowing ordeal on the cramped boxcars taking them to Stalag IV-B. Prisoner Floyd Harding remembers his initial impression of the city as “a beautiful place,” with magnificent buildings and churches. While the rest of Germany was “so destroyed and trampled, Dresden was like it was not in the war.” Gordon Zicker, a fellow prisoner, agrees, recalling that “Dresden was a nice, pretty city with civilians walking around and naturally no war.”

The illusion of a beautiful, war-free Dresden, however, would soon burst for these men, going as flat as the champagne bubbles after the wedding of Billy Pilgrim’s daughter. The prisoners were marched to their new home, a fenced-in and razor-wired compound on the southern bank of the Elbe River, which had formerly served as a slaughterhouse. After entering the compound’s main gate, guarded by a bronze statue of a steer, the men were led to their new living quarters. They would be housed in a large, rectangular, concrete-block building that had originally been a holding pen and slaughter area for livestock. Two-thirds of the building had been converted into sleeping barracks, with double-decker bunks crowded one against the other. The remaining third of the building contained a refectory and kitchen area. When they were first selected for the Dresden detail, fellow prisoners had joked about how lucky these 150 men were—assigned to work in a beautiful city safe from the war. But they soon discovered how much more grueling life was in the Dresden slaughterhouse than in Stalag IV-B. Subsisting on starvation rations, the men worked twelve-hour days only to return to freezing cold barracks at night. They would wake before dawn the next day to start the whole process over again, all the while trying to avoid the attention of the more sadistic guards.

Gifford Doxsee was one of the fifteen prisoners, along with Vonnegut, who were assigned to work at the König malt factory. The majority of the factory had been converted during the late war years to manufacture the ersatz coffee, made of roasted grain, sugar beet shavings, and chicory, which was drunk by the American POWs and ordinary Dresdeners as well. Doxsee’s job consisted mostly of physical labor—unloading boxcars of grain and other materials, hauling them around the factory, and working the bagging machine on the building’s top floor. A series of pipes sucked up the grain from the ground level, where it was loaded into burlap sacks for storage. While ersatz coffee was the factory’s main business, it still produced a small amount of the sweet malt syrup that was its principal product before the war. Doxsee recalls that German civilian women did most of the work in making and packaging the syrup.

Sometimes these women would kindly turn their backs so that the American prisoners, all of whom had hidden spoons, could dip into the still-cooking syrup. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut writes that, on his second day in the factory, Billy Pilgrim spoons up some of the hot liquid, twisting it into a “gooey lollipop” that he thrusts into his mouth. After a moment, “every cell in Billy’s body shook him with ravenous gratitude and applause.” But spooning up the syrup was considered a serious crime. Doxsee remembers getting caught one day by the Nazi foreman as he was putting a spoon back. Pale with fear, he escaped with only a venomous tongue-lashing rather than the physical beating he expected.

Terror wasn’t the only weapon the Nazis used against the American prisoners. Sometimes, they used propagandistic persuasion as well.

Terror wasn’t the only weapon the Nazis used against the American prisoners. Sometimes, they used propagandistic persuasion as well. In the novel, Vonnegut describes an “interesting visitor” that the American prisoners receive two days before the firebombing. Howard W. Campbell Jr., an American-born Nazi propagandist, comes to urge the men to join a new German army unit of his own devising, “The Free American Corps,” which would fight on the Russian front. Campbell promises the famished men that they will be fed steak dinners, mashed potatoes, and mince pies if they volunteer, and that, after the German victory, they’ll be repatriated through Switzerland. At least eight veterans of the slaughterhouse camp recall that a similar figure actually did visit them in the barracks, offering them “the life of Riley” if they would join the German Army. Half of these men specifically name the visitor “Campbell.”

While these former prisoners might be mixing up the shadowy figure from the camps with the character from Vonnegut’s novel, it’s also possible that Campbell might have been the man’s real name, which Vonnegut borrowed. Some of the ex-POWs recall this person as a German officer, some remember him as an American, and others insist that he was British and pretended to be from the Red Cross. Despite the haze of events recalled in memory long afterward, there’s no doubt that the visitor was real. He left behind a letter addressed to “Soldiers of the United States of America,” which was preserved by former prisoner Tom Jones. It seems most likely, based on spellings in the letter and prisoner memory, that the man was British. The letter advises the Americans that their real enemy is not the Germans at all, but rather the “cruel Asiatic hords [sic]” of Soviet Bolsheviks that “slaughter and torment women and children.” It concludes by urging the Americans to join German soldiers in defending Western culture against the “barbaric asiatic East.” This figure of the Nazi recruiter trying to turn the Americans against the Russians would become important for Vonnegut’s complicated perspective on the war.

Readers of Slaughterhouse-Five unfamiliar with Vonnegut’s other books might not realize that Howard W. Campbell Jr. first appeared as the main character of Vonnegut’s earlier novel Mother Night, published in 1962. Like Slaughterhouse–Five, Mother Night explores the shadowy line separating good and evil during wartime. The novel is presented as the prison “confessions” of Campbell, an American-born playwright turned Nazi radio announcer during the war. Although Campbell insists that he was really a double agent sending coded messages to the Allies during his radio broadcasts, he can provide no evidence to support this claim and is currently being held in an Israeli prison, awaiting trial for war crimes. The novel, with its famous moral—“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be”—explicitly stated in Vonnegut’s new introduction to the 1966 edition, raises questions about constructed identity, the limits of nationalism, and whether the ends justify the means as it probes whether Campbell did more harm as an anti-Semitic Nazi propagandist than good as an Allied double agent.

____________________________

From Vonnegut’s War: The Making of Slaughterhouse-Five by Susan Farrell. Copyright © 2026. Available from Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing.

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Says a narrator in Marlon James’s freshly Booker-nominated The Disappearers, “I’ve made such a terrible mess out of being a homo.”

The novel’s protagonists are all gay men in ‘80s and ‘90s Jamaica; each makes similar proclamations. “But the statement is unfair,” says James from his home in Brooklyn. “It’s a statement that I think battered people, bruised people would make. There’s this idea of what a perfect homosexual is. Was he out enough? Did he sleep with enough people? Did he fight for rights?”

James has spent most of the last decade in the fantastical Dark Star Trilogy. The Disappearers, set in the smothering Kingston of his childhood, is his most personal work. “It’s not autofiction,” he specifies, “but it’s the first novel where I’m drawing so much from my life. I know that’s usually a debut novel for people. I had to wait six novels to do it.”

The result is revelatory. An unblinking portrait of gay joy and pain in a society that derides gayness at every turn. “Jesus, I don’t think about it a lot but people want to kill us,” writes 18-year-old Eddy Porteous in his journal, the book’s opening segment. “Us, I’m a part of an us that people just want to beat to death.”

James attended what he describes as a “pretty posh” high school in Kingston. “I was never physically bullied,” he says of those days. “But I didn’t need to be. Verbal bullying was enough. This pressure to conform. What does it mean when you’re the class sissy?”

Some of the prejudice in The Disappearers is lifted straight from James’s own boyhood, as when Eddy resists buying Prince’s Lovesexy because the album cover will tarnish his already sullied reputation. But James also interviewed dozens of queer Jamaicans while researching the book. Many of these stories come from them.

“It’s like when I wrote Brief History,” he says. “I didn’t have to imagine much. The truth was stranger and wilder, more violent and more disturbing.”

The inciting arc of The Disappearers involves a six-man play staged by Havelock Titus, he of the “terrible mess.” The amateur, all-gay, multigenerational troupe is set to perform John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes, a 1967 production about homosexuality in prison. Havelock, who by dint of an Oxford education is more worldly than his players, plans to make a statement by putting on the show in Jamaica in 1988—until a horrific act of violence interrupts rehearsals and scatterers the actors to the proverbial winds.

While James didn’t experience physical homophobic attacks, “I knew about them, and all it did was send me further into the closet,” he says. “I was one of many who ran to the church, because the church was going to make me straight.”

Here lies the novel’s autofictional divergence. Young Eddy Porteous, who spends his days “blasting cum all over pictures of Michael Hutchence,” is swiftly embracing his homosexuality. And Jordan Brown, narrator of the novel’s longest section, says, “I’ve always failed at appearing straight, not because I acted like a faggot but because I fucking hate straight people. Liking people who hate you is what the X-Men do. […] I could fuck a pretty man. I could let an ugly man fuck me. The thing is, both pretty and ugly are interesting in their own way. Straight people for the most part never grew up having to be a sexual anything, so they are just an ordinary form of nothing.”

“It’s not autofiction,” he specifies, “but it’s the first novel where I’m drawing so much from my life. I know that’s usually a debut novel for people. I had to wait six novels to do it.”

Because each narrator inhabits a more advanced stage of sexual discovery, I ask James if they represent progressive facets of his own coming out. A particular age, say, or a frustration, or a relationship. No, says James, that’s not quite right. Rather, given his flight to the church, “Part of this book is a weird kind of FOMO for me. Even the bad stuff.”

James didn’t move to America on a permanent basis until 2007, when he began a 15-year teaching career at Macalester College. “But I was definitely escaping to New York quite a bit [before then],” he says, “sometimes up to six months every year.”

James remembers living “pretty dissociated lives” during this time. “In America,” he says, “I wouldn’t be cruising or anything. I mean, I wouldn’t have dared. But I would be putting on what you would call faggy clothes, almost as if I’m impersonating a queer person, and walking around downtown New York and being myself.”

In the Bronx, where he stayed with Jamaican relatives, James remained buttoned up. It was only when he crossed the Harlem River that he donned his Levi’s Offender Jeans (named for their low-rise cut). “I’m living this sort of bohemian queer life, but it was like Cinderella,” he says. “By 9 or 10 p.m., I had to run back to the Barnes and Noble bookstore and change back into my normal people clothes. One of the reasons I moved to the Midwest, I think, was to go somewhere where family would never visit, somewhere I would never get the scrutiny.”

Minnesota isn’t an option for the men in The Disappearers. For the most part, neither is New York.

“No faggot in Jamaica is living, we’re not even existing,” says Jordan. “We’re just surviving. Some survive better than others, not just the ones who can pass, but the sissy who passes just enough that nobody asks him questions to his face.”

A 25-year-old “sometime prostitute,” Jordan is the novel’s vengeful Ahab, a bottomless vessel for James’s— and, presumably, his interviewees’—rage. The actors are bewildered and alone after the attack. (Per James, “battered, bruised.”) But Jordan’s reaction is the strongest, especially when local media blames the victims instead of searching for the perpetrators.

“I didn’t think about it that deeply until I started researching lynching in the States,” says James. “Nine times out of ten, the white witnesses say that people lynched themselves. It was ‘Black-on-Black crime,’ or ‘They’re so excitable.’ I realized that in Jamaica, and in a lot of homophobic countries, they say, ‘Their brains are not the same’ or ‘He was an abuser,’ or ‘He made a pass at somebody.’”

The parallel grew more defined with further research. “It was shocking to me,” says James. “The language of bigotry really is the same, no matter what you hate. Bigotry is kind of unimaginative in that way.”

“Hanging, castrating,” Jordan rants to Eddy, “beheading, burning, beating, what else? Stoning, bludgeoning, boiling, from before the dark ages until now they been killing us […] Sometimes I get so mad I wonder how one fucking body can hold all of it. So I go to the gym to get fitter and stronger. And every time I fuck a closet case I bite him in the ass or neck, or better yet—give him a hickey that his wife can’t mistake for anything else. Or I dare them to hit me so I can beat the shit out of them. So fucking mad at so many people I still think my head goin’ explode.”

Jordan’s vitriol is a perfect match for James’s talent. But when the anger finally ebbs—and it does, not often, but it does—The Disappearers channels the love and humor that makes its characters tick.

“A therapist once asked me how I felt about being gay,” says Jordan. “I said to him okay, if you strip all the fuckery that God lay in my way ever since I started sucking dick and just focus on the fact of faggotry, how do I feel? You know what the answer was? I fucking love it. Maybe not love so much as fascinated by it. Enthralled? More like spellbound. Yeah, spellbound with being gay from when I was eight and didn’t know what it meant or that it would have anything to do with sex since I also didn’t know what the fuck sex was.”

Its passages like this where James’s own bildungsroman drifts, perhaps, into view. The love. The discontent. The “FOMO.” Driving a guileless Eddy around Kingston in the novel’s early pages, a more experienced Jordan tells his passenger, “You do realize that there is a Jamaica underneath this Jamaica, right?”

James never received such mentorship from a gay friend. It wasn’t available. “I had one lesbian friend,” he says, “and it put a huge strain on our friendship. When she came out, I immediately started finding ways to distance myself.” As a result, “I spent most of the 80s in my bedroom listening to The Cure.”

“One thing about being in a former British Colony,” James explains, “is that in some ways it never stops being a Victorian Society. We’re obsessed with morality but have all these undergrounds.”

In The Disappearers, James embraces a Jamaican subculture that he long held at arm’s length. But signs point to improvement back home. A younger generation of queer Jamaicans is staying on the island rather than migrating, he says, which means that “Every kid in Jamaica now has a gay friend.” This could make all the difference in the world. Especially when those kids grow up.

“Does it mean I’m going to hold my fiancé’s hand and walk on a street in Jamaica?” James asks. “Probably not. But I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody does it. And I wouldn’t be surprised if nobody really cares.”

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