Star Trek Turns 60, Promptly Sells You A Casserole Dish
Your mid-week genre news round-up, 7–9 September 2026: awards nobody turned up for, a Voldemort who isn’t old enough to hire a car, and Le Creuset boldly braising where no pan has gone before.
Space, the final frontier — now dishwasher safe
Tuesday marked the Star Trek 60th anniversary, six decades since the show first flickered onto NBC, and the franchise celebrated the way all beloved institutions do at sixty: by monetising its own nostalgia with tremendous enthusiasm.
Paramount used the occasion to confirm a new Star Trek feature from Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley — the Game Night and Honor Among Thieves pair — set further into the future with an all-new crew, and promising to “subvert with respect”, which is the sort of phrase that means either “we have a brilliant idea” or “we have lawyers”.
Rather more importantly, Le Creuset has launched an official Star Trek range. There is a Galileo shuttlecraft casserole dish at around $150, alien-shaped mini cocottes at $60 a pop, a Spock-ear mug, and — the crown jewel of late capitalism — a communicator-styled cheese grater for $68. Gene Roddenberry dreamed of a post-scarcity society in which humanity had transcended the pursuit of material wealth. Gene Roddenberry did not anticipate the artisanal grater market.
Elsewhere in the Trekiverse, Star Trek Voyager: Across the Unknown gets a free update on 1 October adding the U.S.S. Equinox and a roguelike “Q Trials” mode, with John de Lancie back to be insufferable in an official capacity. Some things you cannot improve upon.
The Dragon Awards: winners announced, winners absent
Dragon Con handed out its 2026 Dragon Awards over the weekend, and the results are a decent snapshot of what actual paying readers are reading rather than what committees think they should be.
Matt Dinniman took Best Science Fiction Novel for Operation Bounce House — the Dungeon Crawler Carl man continuing his march from serialised oddity to genre fixture. Jim Butcher won Best Fantasy for Twelve Months, Joe Hill took Horror with King Sorrow, S.M. Stirling landed Alternate History for The Winds of Fate, and Delilah S. Dawson won YA with Ride or Die. On screen, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms took Best TV Series and Project Hail Mary — Lord and Miller’s adaptation — won Best Movie. T. Kingfisher’s Hemlock & Silver took Best Illustrative Cover, and Hollow Knight: Silksong finally won something after a decade of people asking whether it existed.
The wrinkle: File 770 reports the ceremony drew roughly fifty attendees, with most of the major winners not in the room, and voting participation down on previous years. An award scaling down while the con around it scales up is an odd trick to pull off, and one suspects the Dragons have some thinking to do about what the ceremony is actually for.
Better news for the smaller silverware: Eric J. Juneau won the Mike Resnick Memorial Award for best unpublished SF short by a new author with “UFO TKO” — a title that deserves a story attached to it — and A.C. Wise took the juried Eugie Award for “Wolf Moon, Antler Moon”.
The Horror Writers Association continues to eat itself
If you enjoy genre politics with the safety catch off, the HWA has spent the past fortnight providing a masterclass. Following a trustee’s removal in August and a formal complaint from the organisers of Creepaway Camp alleging heavy-handed pressure tactics, the Association has dissolved its Executive Director post entirely — the role held by Maxwell Ian Gold — and disbanded its Grievance Committee for good measure. President Lisa Wood says a Bylaws Committee will deliver governance reform.
Dissolving the grievance committee during a grievance is a bold structural choice. Horror writers, of all people, might have spotted where that plot goes.
On a happier organisational note, Baen has established the David A. Drake Memorial Award for military SF and fantasy, with submissions opening 24 September. Hammer’s Slammers casts a long shadow, and it’s a fitting memorial.
Screen: a Voldemort with GCSEs pending
HBO’s Harry Potter has cast Billy Barratt — the Invasion actor and youngest-ever International Emmy winner — as Tom Riddle, with Lenny Rush (Doctor Who) as Dobby and Bonnie Hill taking over as Ginny Weasley. Rush’s casting is the genuinely interesting one: an actor with dwarfism playing Dobby opens the door to prosthetics over a wholly CG house-elf, which is the sort of decision that ages considerably better than a render farm.
Silo has confirmed its fourth and final season lands on Apple TV on 9 July 2027, teaser and all — which is a long wait, though as anyone who’s read Hugh Howey knows, patience in a silo is rather the point.
Netflix, meanwhile, is developing a live-action Dungeons & Dragons: Ravenloft, created by John August with Alfonso Cuarón executive producing, tracking Strahd von Zarovich’s fall from tragic antihero to full Darklord. Gothic horror, doomed romance, and a prestige budget: if they get it right, Barovia may finally escape its reputation as the campaign setting where your DM kills your favourite character to teach you something.
Also worth noting: AMC has settled its long-running profit-participation lawsuit with Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman and producers for a reported $120 million, proving the undead really are hard to kill. And at the Creative Arts Emmys, Apple’s Widow’s Bay took eight statuettes and Prime Video’s Spider-Noir five — a decent night for genre in the categories where the actual craftspeople live. Godzilla Minus Zero stomps into cinemas on 6 November.
On the shelves
A strong Tuesday just gone: Garth Nix‘s Massif (Harper Voyager), R.S. Ford‘s Absolon Creed (Orbit), Hannah Kaner‘s A Snake Among Swans (Harper Voyager) and Alice Hoffman‘s The Witches of Cambridge (Scribner) all landed on 8 September, with Nicholas Sansbury Smith‘s Burning Skies alongside them.
For those with deeper pockets, the Folio Society has produced a limited edition of Liu Cixin’s Three-Body trilogy — 1,344 pages, new introduction, Matt Griffin artwork, signed by author and artist. And in the “genre gatecrashes the literary party” column, Jennifer Chevalier’s The Winter Witch has made the Giller Prize longlist.
