The winners of the 2026 Hugo Awards for the best science fiction and fantasy of 2025 were announced at LA Con V, the World Science Fiction Convention on the weekend. These were the winners of the fiction awards.
BEST NOVEL: The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow
BEST NOVELLA: The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar
BEST NOVELETTE: “Never Eaten Vegetables” by H.H. Pak
BEST SHORT STORY: “In My Country” by Thomas Ha
I was pleased to see that The Everlasting won for Best Novel. I read and enjoyed it, somewhat to my surprise. I did try to read The River Has Roots and gave up after about 20 pages; I may give it another shot. BTW, the author is Canadian. To (I am sure) no one's surprise, John Scalzi won the Hugo for Best Series.
A Substack post by Mary Geddry last week hit a chord with me. In Gradually, Then Suddenly she looks at the effects that climate change is having on the world and the implications for our society.
It starts like this.
There is a famous exchange in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises in which one character asks another how he went bankrupt.
“Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.”
That line came up in one of the climate interviews I was watching this weekend, and it has been rattling around in my head ever since because it turns out to be a pretty good description of how complicated systems fail.
After a discussion of ocean warming, she gets to, what for me, was the key point of the essay.
We frequently talk about adaptation as though the climate were moving from one stable setting to another. Build higher seawalls, install more air conditioning, enlarge the culverts, move the flood maps, plant different crops and then carry on.
Horton’s deliberately provocative formulation is that adapting to the climate of 2026 is “pointless” if we mean adapting once and declaring victory, because the climate of 2027, 2028 and 2029 will continue changing unless we stop adding greenhouse gases.
Adaptation itself is obviously not pointless. Horton spends considerable time explaining how urgently we need it.
The moving baseline is the problem. You cannot build resilience around yesterday’s definition of normal when normal itself is moving.
And a little later.
Climate change does not necessarily need to blow infrastructure apart to make it fail. It only needs to invalidate the assumptions under which it was designed, and do so faster than we can redesign the infrastructure.
We're seeing this now, with sea level rise, the increase in wildfires, and the strengthening trends in tropical storms.
On August 27th, she followed it up with another post on the same theme, tied to the disaster in the Himalayas.
What failed was the mountain itself, its structural integrity, built up and eroded over a timescale that has nothing to do with news cycles, finally giving way in the time it takes to read this sentence. If “Gradually, Then Suddenly” was about systems reaching their breaking point, a river too shallow to cool a reactor, an insurance market too strained to underwrite a coastline, Rasuwa district is what happens when the system is the mountain, and the villages built beneath it never had a say.
Climate change happens gradually. Structural failure happens all at once. Nepal is the second half of that sentence.
She goes on to discuss the importance of monitoring.
Journalist Leela Jasinto pointed out that it is also a region under real development pressure; hydroelectric projects, infrastructure expansion, population growth pushed into terrain that is, by any geological measure, still geologically active. The same steep, unstable, glacially-fed valleys that make this terrain dangerous are also what make it valuable for trade routes, for hydropower, for the water itself. Nepal’s government now faces the same question in the aftermath that it faced before Wednesday, only louder: how do you develop a landscape that is actively, geologically alive, without eventually building directly in the path of what it’s going to do next.
That’s what the monitoring gap actually costs. It’s the difference between a government that can weigh economic development against geological risk honestly, and one that finds out the terms of that trade-off by accident.
This is Tendon, Not Fat applied to the physical world: the monitoring station that watches a glacier for twenty uneventful years looks like bureaucratic overhead until year twenty-one, when knowing that glacier is moving becomes the difference between a warning and a body count. Monitoring is a bit of an abstraction. It’s satellites, gauges, staffed research stations, the unglamorous infrastructure of simply knowing what a warming planet is doing before it does it to you. This is the boring stuff you fund during “gradually,” when it looks unnecessary, so that “suddenly” doesn’t catch you empty-handed.
And as she points out, the Trump administration is doing everything it can to disrupt or remove the systems that help us track the effects of climate change.
I'm going to post something I wrote here in 2020 in a post titled The Pandemic and a Fragile World that is still relevant and ties in perfectly to Geddry's posts.
I hadn't really thought much about our modern reliance on optimization and how it affects supply chains until reading Vernor Vinge's, A Deepness on the Sky, a couple of decades ago. In this novel, an interstellar trader visits a world that by most standards would be called a paradise. But it relied on a highly optimized system for food production. A hundred and fifty years later, when the trader returned, the planet had reverted to savagery because of a series of unanticipated catastrophes. That got me thinking.
We've seen examples of problems caused by super-optimized supply chains before the pandemic hit. A cyberattack on the Maersk shipping company disrupted commerce across the world. A fire at a resin-producing factory knocked out 90 percent of the world's production of resin used to make vinyl records. Now our reliance on Chinese factories is causing shortages of everything from drugs to smartphones.
Pandemic. Mideast war. Climate change. All of these are a threat to a stable world.
I'm going to end with a rather prescient song from the 1980s: Bruce Cockburn's "The Trouble With Normal".
This week's photo is of the Lake Ontario shoreline in Pickering near sunset about a month ago. And yes, that is the correct name of the lake. Taken with my Pixel 8 Pro.
YouTube's algorithm keeps presenting me with some real gems, and today's post is one of them: Miles David Live in Berlin 1969. I don't know anything about the video other than it appear to be from a German jazz festival and I'm guessing it was shown on German TV. The video quality is about what you'd expect from 1969 but the sound is fine.
In any case, it's a spectacular performance featuring, along with Davis, Jack DeJohnette on drums, Dave Holland on bass, Chick Corea on keys, and Wayne Shorter on sax. You can't ask for more, except maybe for a longer video.
Here's the tracklist.
00:00 - Introduction
02:02 - Directions
08:52 - Bitches Brew
22:41 - It's About That Time
37:22 - I Fall in Love Too Easily
40:50 - Sanctuary
44:27 - The Theme
It's interesting to hear early versions of some of the material ("Bitches Brew" and "Sanctuary:" that ended up on the Bitches Brew album the next year. I have to wonder what the audience thought of the new material. Enjoy!
Now that trade talks between Canada and the US have broken off, it seems that we are now in a full scale trade war. Before I get into the heavy stuff, let's start with this wonderful video,
Now fo the heavy stuff (oldest articles to newest).
Never mind the insults. It’s time for Canada to hit the U.S. where it really hurts (gift link). "Now comes the hard part. There was good reason to bargain long and hard for an iffy deal if it saved the furniture. But when all was said and done, a bad deal would have undone our economy and unravelled our sovereignty. Walking away was the wise move. So what’s our next move, exactly?"
It Has Begun. "We are at war. This was never about tariffs on steel or the fee structure on the Gordie Howe Bridge. From the opening days of the Trump administration, Canada was subject to a new form of warfare — constant harassment and intimidation with a focus on breaking our economy and making us beg to be a vassal territory."
IT IS TIME FOR CANADIAN COURAGE. "Premier Smith is the weakest link in Team Canada’s effort against Trump’s tyranny against us. Don’t let her play games with our provincial well-;being and our national sovereignty."
This is just a small sample from my feeds and news sites over the last couple of weeks. If you want more, the sites of the articles in this post and previous posts in the series.
I'm trying to up my reading game, spending more time reading (which includes having the book read to me by Google Play or the Kinde app), and less time listening to podcasts or doom scrolling. This was also motivated by the need to read a few of the nominees for the Hugo Awards, since I bought a supporting membership to get the voters' packet.
So here are some short reviews of some of the books I've read in the last few months.
Children of Time/Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky: I've been meaning to read something by Adrian Tchaikovsky for quite a while after recommendations by friends and family members, and I'm glad I did. Both Children of Time and Children of Ruin were highly readable SF with interesting and believable aliens, solid world building, and well-developed characters. I found the plot of Children of Ruin a bit hard to follow in places, but other than that I thoroughly enjoyed both books.
The Regicide Report by Charles Stross: With The Regicide Report, Charles Stross finally completes the main story arc of his long-running Laundry Files series. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who hasn't read at least some of the other books in the series. Given that the events in the book take place before the sequel New Management trilogy, it felt a bit redundant.
Death of the Author by Ndedi Okefor: This is a Hugo nominee and I might not have read it otherwise. In the near future, a university teacher of creative writing gets fired after criticizing a student and decides to write a science fiction novel. The book becomes a huge success, completely altering the author's life. In alternating sections, Okefor includes parts of the author's novel, gradually integrating the two stories. It's well done and very readable, if a bit heavy on family drama.
The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow: I am not a big fan of fantasy novels, but decided to read this based on some glowing reviews and its Hugo nomination. It's a riff on the Arthurian legend, with a time travel loop thrown in. I found it quite compelling; the setting, pacing, and characterization are first rate and Harrow is a top flight prose stylist. It may win the Hugo award this year and it would be well deserved.
Ancestral Night/Machine by Elizabeth Bear. I have read and enjoyed several shorter stories by Elizabeth Bear but have not read any of her novels until now. These are space operas with a large cast of aliens and a diverse human culture spreading through the galaxy. I liked the setting and stories but there was too much character introspection for my taste, and I found myself skimming a lot. I will read the third book in the series, Folded Sky, soon..
Coming soon, a review of Biological War: A Scenario, by Annie Jacobsen.
Today's photo is of marigolds that we planted along the side of our garden to attract pollinators. We've planted them before, but this year they really took off. Taken with my Pixel 8 Pro.
