An Upset at the Hugos, a Sequel Thirteen Years Late, and a Reaper Who Can’t Keep Still (news roundup).
Three weeks ago the genre world was still hosing San Diego glitter off its shoes after Comic-Con. Since then it has published roughly the population of a small town’s worth of new fantasy novels, lost a beloved author, elected a woman who moonlights as a fantasy novelist to hand out its most prestigious trophies, and somehow still found time to argue about a Balrog. Consider this the highlights reel, for anyone who blinked.
It started, as these things do, with books refusing to slow down. Late July brought Andrea Eames’s A Tangled Magic, in which a heroine with independently-minded hair is stuck up a tower with a telepathic raven for company — Rapunzel, reimagined by someone who clearly does not trust hairdressers. Elsewhere Sarah Beth Durst offered the cosy fantasy palate-cleanser Sea of Charms, Juliet Blackwell paired ghosts with gardening in The Séance Garden, and Jesse Aragon’s The Demon Star had its heroine claw back from death only to find aliens, cultists and gods all queuing up to end the world, which feels like overkill even by apocalypse standards. Richard Swan then turned up with The Infinite State, launching a new series pitched somewhere between 1984 and The Expanse, which is either an impressive bit of world-building or proof the dystopia genre has finally run out of fresh adjectives.
Screen news that week was all Comic-Con fallout: Blade Runner 2099 finally showed its hand, with Michelle Yeoh and Hunter Schafer confirmed for a 25 November premiere on Prime Video, while DC’s Lanterns got its own Hall H moment, James Gunn summarising the entire premise as “True Detective, but space cops.” Publishers, meanwhile, kept the deal sheets busy — Penguin picked up a story collection from a YouTuber, Kensington’s Erewhon imprint landed a new romantasy duology, and everyone agreed genre publishing remained thoroughly omnivorous. That roundup ended on a hopeful note: for once, nobody of any note in the SF/fantasy/horror family had died that week. We should probably not have said that out loud.
Because barely three weeks later, the genre lost John Crowley, at 83. Little, Big is one of those novels people don’t so much recommend as press into your hands with a slightly haunted look, and Crowley spent four decades taking fantasy seriously as literature before that was fashionable. The tributes were, deservedly, numerous.
Life, and the publicity machine, went on regardless. The same week gave us the single best piece of marketing timing in recent memory: Ursula Vernon — better known to half her readership as T. Kingfisher — released her new novel Daggerbound on 25 August, then stood up five days later as toastmaster of the Hugo Awards at LAcon V in Anaheim. Somewhere, a publicist has not stopped smiling since March. The pre-ceremony ballot looked like a proper scrap, too: Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author arrived already garlanded with the 2026 Locus Award, which is the awards-season equivalent of bringing a Wikipedia editor to a pub quiz, and Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) had Andor season two, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein and James Gunn’s Superman fighting it out in a three-way that neatly summed up modern screen SFF: prestige space politics, an auteur finally making his monster movie, and a man in a cape being sincerely nice. Adrian Tchaikovsky, meanwhile, published yet another novel (Preaching to the Choir), reinforcing the working theory that he is in fact three people sharing a byline.
Then Anaheim actually happened, and the ballot delivered a small upset: Best Novel went not to the well-fancied Okorafor but to Alix E. Harrow’s The Everlasting. Best Series was scooped up by John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, a franchise old enough to vote, which is either a lifetime-achievement rocket or proof the category rewards stamina as much as ambition. Antonia Hodgson had the week of her career, picking up the Astounding Award for Best New Writer while also turning up as a Best Novel finalist for The Raven Scholar. And Apple TV’s Murderbot took Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form, which its extremely reluctant robot narrator would no doubt find deeply, deeply irritating. Over in the rather more niche business of imagining history gone sideways, the 2026 Sidewise Awards went to Vaishnavi Patel’s Ten Incarnations of Rebellion for Best Long Form — a category that exists specifically so alternate-history writers have somewhere to put their trophies that isn’t a Hugo shelf.
This week’s new arrivals suggest nobody has told the publishing conveyor belt that summer is meant to be winding down. James Islington’s Scion and Scott Hawkins’s Blacktail both landed on the 1st, Freya Marske’s Bodies of Magic follows on the 15th, and — genuinely exciting news for anyone who read it the first time round — Helene Wecker is finally delivering a sequel to 2013’s The Golem and the Jinni with The Gates of Midnight, a mere thirteen years on. Some series take their time.
On screen, the pattern from a few weeks back — adaptations quietly running out of source material and having to improvise — continues apace. Apple’s Dark Matter spent its second season going past Blake Crouch’s novel entirely, and this fortnight brings Outlander: Blood of My Blood back for a second helping of Jacobite-era prequel (18 September, Starz), an animated Stranger Things: Tales from ’85 spinoff filling in gaps between seasons (17 September, Netflix), and Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil reboot arriving in cinemas the same day as Outlander, apparently determined to be genuinely frightening rather than campy. Between the prequels, the spinoffs and the sequels nobody asked for but everyone will watch, television has more or less given up waiting for new books and started writing fan fiction with a budget.
And the Reaper, mercifully, has gone quiet again this week — no fresh losses to report. Given the last time somebody said that out loud it lasted about three weeks, we’ll enjoy the silence without making any promises on its behalf.
