WSFA Names Its 2026 Small Press Finalists: Billionaire’s Tears and Teleporting Fairies (award news).

The Washington Science Fiction Association has announced the eight finalists for its 2026 WSFA Small Press Award, proving once again that if you leave speculative-fiction writers unattended for long enough they will produce billionaires in tears, teleporting fairies, suspicious fish and at least one bag whose interior dimensions almost certainly breach several building regulations.

The award celebrates original speculative short fiction published by small presses during 2025. This is useful work because the small press is where science fiction often goes when it wants to try something peculiar before the larger publishing industry notices, buys the film rights and starts wondering whether the protagonist could perhaps be younger and accompanied by a marketable robot.

This year’s finalists are:

• Bag of Holding by Liz Westbrook-Trenholm, published in On Spec, edited by Diane Walton;
• Billionaire’s Tears by Vanessa Ricci-Thode, from Escape Pod, edited by Mur Lafferty;
• Blackrock by R. M. Olson, from the Skull X Bones anthology, edited by David B. Coe and Joshua Palmatier;
• Guardians of the Well by Rose Strickman, published in In Another Time Magazine;
• Half Life by Stephen Harper, also appearing in Skull X Bones;
• The Last Mardi Gras by Raven Jakubowski, from DreamForge Anvil;
• Not a Fish by Andrew Dykstal, published by Beneath Ceaseless Skies; and
• The Teleporting Disaster Fairy by Rati Mehrotra, published in Uncanny Magazine.

It is an excellent shortlist purely on titles. The Teleporting Disaster Fairy sounds less like a short story and more like the person responsible for reorganising your railway journey five minutes before departure, while Billionaire’s Tears may be the only liquid currently more expensive than printer ink.

Ricci-Thode’s Billionaire’s Tears, incidentally, concerns a world afflicted by an exceedingly selective plague connected with enormous wealth, which already gives it the air of speculative fiction desperately trying to escape into the financial pages. It originally appeared as an Escape Pod story in July 2025. Meanwhile, Andrew Dykstal’s fantasy Not a Fish, published by Beneath Ceaseless Skies, has already attracted attention elsewhere, while Rati Mehrotra’s magnificently titled disaster fairy was among the fiction picked out by Uncanny Magazine readers from its 2025 output.

The WSFA award has another feature we rather approve of here at SFcrowsnest: during the selection process, the authors and publishers are hidden from the voters. In other words, there is no famous-name gravitational field, no publisher prestige bonus and no opportunity to think, “I met her at a convention once and she bought me a pint.” The stories have to stagger into the arena under their own power.

That seems especially appropriate for an award intended to champion small presses. One of the joys of the independent end of science fiction publishing has always been its willingness to print stories that might cause a larger commercial publisher to stroke its chin, summon a marketing department and eventually suggest replacing the sentient fungal colony with a detective.

The WSFA Small Press Award itself has been knocking around since 2007, when its first winner was Peter S. Beagle for El Regalo. Nearly two decades later, its purpose remains pleasingly straightforward: point readers towards good speculative fiction appearing outside the biggest publishing machinery and give the editors and presses responsible a little deserved sunlight.

The eventual winner will be chosen by members of the Washington Science Fiction Association and unveiled at Capclave 2026, running from 2-4 October at the Hilton Washington DC/Rockville Executive Meeting Center in Maryland.

Until then, eight stories enter and one story leaves carrying the metaphorical crown. Although, given this particular shortlist, we would advise organisers to check the crown very carefully before putting it on. There may be a fairy inside it, the crown may contain a pocket universe, or someone may suddenly announce that it is not, technically speaking, a crown at all.