Reading the Hugos: Best Novella 2026

 A roundup of this year's novella nominees.

It's Hugo time bay-beeeeeee. I love awards season. There's a lot of reasons for that, but honestly the main one is that it's the time of year when the conversation all aligns and we're discussing the same books as each other, picking at things and having big thoughts about them, and through them into genre and how it's doing at the moment. Delightful!

And so, in the spirit of doing my part, I'm going to chat about one of this year's Hugo categories, one particularly dear to my heart: the novella.

For those not familiar, the novella category looks at science fiction or fantasy stories published or translated into English during the previous calendar year, which specifically are works of fiction of between 17,500 and 40,000 words in length. Still chunky enough to feel like a whole book, but short enough you can binge them in a sitting if you're so inclined, I find novellas such a nicely digestible format, perfectly in between a full novel and short fiction. There's a lot you can do with that, and I am just incredibly fond of it as a format, and so I read a fair few in any given year.

Which alas means that, as in this year, I'm a bit disappointed when the Hugo shortlist isn't representative of the good things out there in the ecosystem. I'll get into the specifics of the books themselves in a minute, but in my view, this is an unfortunately weak shortlist when taken collectively. It draws heavily from a single publisher (Tor, as is often the way) but even when doing so, manages not to represent the best of what they have to offer, because whatever else you might want to say about the situation, Tor does put out a robust and substantial offering of novellas every year from which we can draw. This just... ain't it. I'll come back to that a little more at the end. But first, let's actually talk through the works in question:

The shortlist this year contains:

• The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar (Tordotcom; Arcadia UK) 
• What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher (Nightfire; Titan UK) 
• Cinder House by Freya Marske (Tordotcom; Tor UK) 
• Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz (Tordotcom)
• The Summer War by Naomi Novik (Del Rey US; Del Rey UK) 
• Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite (Tordotcom)

Going from the top, then:

The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar.

This is, for me, unquestionably the best book on the shortlist. I read it almost immediately when it came out, and was delighted to find it showcased El-Mohtar's signature lyrical approach to prose magnificently. Inspired by and loosely retelling the story of The Bonny Swans, there is a strong sense of folk music that underpins the story-logic and stylings, and El-Mohtar has done a lot of good work to do this in a way that feels distinct from just fairytales or mythic retellings: it is emphatically folk music that forms the bedrock. Which of course means there's a lot of horrible to go along with the fantastical. Folk songs are rarely cheery things. The ending is perhaps slightly happier than I might expect from the context, but still feels thoroughly in keeping with the tone.

The whole thing is intensely readable, with an interesting approach to magic (referred to as "grammar" and left delightfully slippery as to its specifics), a believable sisterly relationship, and a fairy-world that has the necessary alien quality to feel truly detached from human things.

My only criticism of it is that, in the year or so since I read it, it has mostly slipped out of my memory, especially in the specifics. It's a book of tone and feeling, and that feeling persists, but the details easily and quickly fuzzed over. Even so, it was excellent, and I think it would be an entirely worthy winner.

What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher (Sworn Soldier #3)

For all that I didn't love What Moves the Dead, the first in the Sworn Soldier series of novellas and a retelling of The Fall of the House of Usher, I will wholeheartedly admit that it was intensely creepy. I don't particularly like creepy, but I salute the success of it there and did not want to read the book at night or in the dark. That feels like a goal well achieved.

What Stalks the Deep... does not achieve that. It has all the ingredients to do so, inspired as it is by an H. P. Lovecraft story (At the Mountains of Madness) with its mysterious cave, inexplicable glowing lights, missing men, horrible noises and so on. And yet, tonally, it feels consistently soft and gentle. I never had any concern that things wouldn't turn out, in some way, alright, more or less. Despite moments that really ought to be terrifying, of the claustophobia of mine tunnels, of suffocation and near death experience... somehow none of it actually manages the emotional payoff of terror, or even a light disquiet. I'd wonder perhaps if this is Kingfisher's typical humour working counter to the aims of the story, but both managed to co-exist in What Moves the Dead, so I find myself at a bit of a loss about it all.

The loss of the horror does not really seem to come with the addition of much else though, which leaves the story feeling oddly insubstantial. Shortly after I put it down, I described it as having "passed frictionless through my brain", which I hold even more true the more time passes. The writing, the wry self-deprecating humour at oneself and society, remains distinctively in Kingfisher's voice, making it a very easy, pleasant read. There's just not much else to hang your hat on, alas. 

Cinder House by Freya Marske

This is the first of the two fairytale-style stories proper, though I would group them along with The River Has Roots into a loose theme. Folk song and fairytale do share a fair bit of thematic ground. This one is, like The River Has Roots, a retelling of a specific story: Cinderella, in this case. However, it's a rather more vicious version than the one we might be used to. Especially because Cinderella - Ella - dies at the beginning of the story.

Marske remakes the fairytale into the afterlife of Ella's furious ghost, having to co-exist with her stepmother and stepsisters after the murder of her father. In this reimagining, the magic of the house absorbs her at the point of death, allowing her to become a sort of ghostly embodiment of its magic, visible only to those who live there and, initially, bound by its confines. The original themes of the Cinderella story remain, as do some of the critical plot beats (including the ball), but they are remade by coming in the wake of the worst already happening. To some extent, the stepmother has won, and so the stakes, what winning might look like, what revenge might mean, are remade too.

Marske also adds a little depth of characterisation to the stepmother (who now has her motives, though they don't exculpate her) and to the dead father, as well as granting a little more agency to one of the step-daughters, and critically makes the prince a character in his own right, rather than the embodiment of the freedom Ella craves. And the ending is more complex (and queerer) than one might imagine.

That being said, it does not truly escape the risk of all fairytale retellings. It's got a twist of difference to it, but it's still stuck telling us a story we already know. And I don't think, ultimately, the twist is enough to convince me it was worth the retelling. The changes amplify much of the original themes, but don't really change them. It's relatively well done, but I don't think exemplary.

Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

I did not like this book. I did not like it at all. It's also one of the kind of books that does not bear up under the lingering scrutiny I tend to direct at awards nominees: the more I think about it, the more it falls apart, even on its key themes and ideas. It is, and here I am using this word again, incredibly insubstantial.

The story follows a group of robots waking up in a shop in California, having been turned off by the shop owners (who have disappeared). The bots, mostly, really need to be working - they have debts to pay, of various sorts - and so, in the absence of the existing restaurant, they decide to set up their own and just hope no one notices that it's not human run. It is fairly obvious from the outset that this will work, and that this is meant to be a relatively cosy story of community and success.

There are, however, a number of problems to grapple with, and one in particular that underlies them all. The world of the story is an independent California, after a mostly unexplored war with the rest of the United States. The area seems to be deprived and war ravaged, with people having to work hard to barely survive. This feels like a really substantial setting, right? A lot to be done with that, possibly some hard hitting critique of the real world? But that doesn't materialise. Problems, even the problems that result from this larger world state, are easily resolved. This includes, at one point, a robot who is haunted by traumatic memories of the war, and the death of his close comrades being told by another robot (a friend) to maybe move his traumatic memories to long term storage rather than immediate memory. This... does not feel to me like a meaningful engagement with that emotional journey.

Newitz keeps trying to set up problems or themes with bigger, thornier stakes... but then never commits to them in that same spirit. Everything is, ultimately, relatively easy, in a way that just does not work with those stakes. It's a story at war with its own tonal choices, with clunky writing to boot, and I think just completely unsuccessful because of it.

The Summer War by Naomi Novik

Another fairytale book! This one, however, is not so much a retelling as a story in the style of fairytales: think something like T. Kingfisher's Nettle and Bone, where the elements are often familiar but not the whole.

In this one, a young daughter of a duke, Celia's beloved brother Argent decides to leave their family home. In her upset, not understanding his reasons, she awakens an as-yet-undiscovered magical talent and curses him to a life without love. He leaves her, becoming a questing knight, and she is left with her guilt, her father's abandonment of his duties at the loss of his favoured son, and the other brother (Roric) she's never really liked.

To save Argent, she must work with Roric, developing a relationship she never gave much notice, and learning more about the world, her family and their history than she realised in the meantime. And, of course, discovering a much bigger threat from the fairy people whose border lies alongside their realm.

While the story of this may be an original one, it nonetheless feels awfully familiar while reading. The plot unfolds very much in expected directions and to expected ends, and without anything about it that really feels... itself. Novik's previous fairytale-type stories, especially Uprooted, have a distinctive voice and setting that stands them apart from the well-worn elements of their creation. The Summer War... less so. It doesn't help that the characterisations, predominantly viewed through the eyes of the main character, are often incredibly flat or weirdly patchy (even including Celia's own internal life). By turns, Celia is both a naive pubescent girl and an accomplished schemer, through only her own wit and the writing of a few letters. A story could make something of that, dig into the complexity of growing up, the changing shape of one's own mind and abilities. But it is not this story. It felt, more than anything, rushed, and the whole thing relies far more on tone and vibes than creating something that feels a coherent whole, with genuine concerns to explore.

Novik certainly captures the feel of fairytale in this story, but none of the pieces quite fit together nicely enough when looked at closely. Especially on a ballot with multiple other fairytale stories, this one feels rather disappointing.

Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite (Dorothy Gentleman #1)

Not a fairytale or a retelling! Murder by Memory is the opening volume in the Dorothy Gentleman series, in which an old lady solves murders on a generation ship while talking about knitting and fussing about her nephew.

As a fan of series like Miss Marple, I was entirely in favour of the premise of this story. And indeed, at the beginning, was pretty on board with the execution. Dorothy wakes up in someone else's body, and has to figure out why the sentient ship has awoken her from digital slumber, let alone put her in the wrong body while doing so, without alerting anyone to the situation. The ship leads her to the dead body it needs her to investigate, and she begins her enquiries, telling us about the ship, its inhabitants and its technologies along the way. Great!

There are two problems, however. The first, and far more troubling, one is simply to do with the pacing. Murder by Memory is relatively short by novella standards, and the majority of the length of it feels like setup. And then, rather suddenly at somewhere around 90%, it switches into resolution mode. There's no sense of a comfortable middle of the story, and between the strange structure and the brevity, I ended up feeling slightly short-changed. I was wondering where the rest had gone to; had I lost a forty page chunk somewhere? But no. It also means there are rather more dangling threads than I would like or expect from this sort of story, even knowing there will be sequels.

The other problem, and possibly something that will be solved by the sequels, is the oddness of the worldbuilding. There's a glimpse into the ship and the people, and they're enough to make me wonder what, why, how would something futuristic end up so retro feeling, but not enough to bed that in and make it feel plausible. It's not really answers I crave, more a sense that this world... well, makes sense.

It's a nice idea, a concept I am very easily enticed into reading, but there's a lot wrong with how it goes about it, by the end.

Final thoughts:

With the exception of The River Has Roots, which is a very well-written novella with a strong prose voice and sense of direction to the story, much of the rest of this shortlist is disappointing in some way. There are structural or tonal issues with most of the entries, plots that don't match up to their premises, conflicting emotional journeys and some janky writing choices in parts. Some years, I look at the novella shortlist and, for all I might wish it otherwise because they're not my favourites, I can at least see why they're someone's favourites. Books with big ideas or engaging plots or fascinating worlds, funny or scary or enticing, or just odd in the compelling way unusual things are. For want of a better word, this shortlist feels quite safe, quite quiet, quite middle-of-the-road (and, incidentally, rather homogenous). There's not much daring or doing. And so I struggle to see quite why someone would pick some of these and say "yes, this is the best that 2025 has to offer", even had I not read a single other novella for the year. And so, I finish this with bafflement. I really just do not get it.

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POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social

Book Review: A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett

The Hugo finalist sequel to the Hugo winning The Tainted Cup.

Readers of The Tainted Cup, now that we have gotten the meeting and setup out of the way, are plunged right into the action of A Drop of Corruption, second in the Ana and Din mysteries by Robert Jackson Bennett. The novel assumes you’ve read the first novel, and know the situation, and know we are going to go right into the action. Ana and Din are investigators for a fantasy Empire, looking into mysteries, particularly murders, that defy normal investigative techniques. It’s an Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe situation: Din does the legwork, while Ana, because of some double edged gifts, usually is never in the field and instead uses what Din (magically augmented to be able to remember anything he sees or hears) gathers to make the case.

 
If you are reading this review, and haven’t read The Tainted Cup, you might be ready to tackle this book with that precis but you will miss a lot of the nuance of the Empire and what it does, and not be quite ready for the further conversation here. There are many lines in this book, and one of them is one that should not be overlooked: a critique of the Empire and the Imperial Project.

 
That critique is a nuanced and interesting one that goes beyond the usual binaries of Chaos vs Absolute Law and Ana and Din, as representatives of the Empire in a important but still independent border Kingdom, do navigate. We saw in The Tainted Cup about the importance of the Empire and also the costs of that Empire as well. We still don’t quite know what the Leviathans really are. Here, in this book, we are in a place where the reagents and the remnants of defeated Leviathans are processed. Yarrow is an important kingdom because of what it can do for the Empire, but it is not yet within the orbit of the Empire. But it seems like it is a matter of time before it is.

And that is interesting because there are conversations about the idea of Imperial Expansion and the uses of Empire and the health of the Empire. Since I think about the Roman Empire everyday, there are two time frames here I am thinking of. First is the 2nd century AD, in the time of Trajan and Hadrian. Trajan conquers a bunch of Mesopotamia from the Persians, in what is now Iraq. However, upon his death, Hadrian begins a campaign of consolidation, giving up the new gains and fortifying the Empire as it is. This is of course where we get Hadrian’s Wall.¹ The point is that the Empire is at a limit...and that is a dangerous place for Empire to be. It’s dangerous for an Empire to further expand, something Ana talks to Din about as Din considers his own problems within the Empire. And it is dangerous for an Empire to remain in this position. That mirrors Din’s all problems again--as Ana’s hands, he is trapped in an old crushing debt, but getting out of that position is difficult. But remaining in that position is taxing. It’s a nice balance of the internal problems of the main character with the geopolitical position of the Empire he works for. What good is an Empire and is it all worth it?

The even stronger second Roman Empire parallel is the 130’s BC and the kingdom of Pergamon. Pergamon was a Greek Kingdom in what we now call Turkey. Attalus III, last king of the kingdom, had no direct heirs, and so bequeathed the kingdom to the then Roman Republic. This was something that seems to have been in the wind for years (much like in this book how the people of Yarrow know that the Empire is slowly closing its jaws around them to absorb them completely). The actual attempted transfer mirrors events in the book here, as a supposed brother challenges the transfer and violence erupts. Here, events diverge from the history, but the upset is that the transfer is much messier and more fraught than it might otherwise be, both for Yarrow and the Empire, and Pergamon and the Roman Republic.

Beyond all of this fascinating and crunchy worldbuilding, supported by the previous novel, there is of course a murder plot, and schemes and wheels within wheels. Now that we have the Ana and Din pattern established, the book can unleash us upon it. Din finds himself in some precarious positions and situations gathering data from Ana, ranging from a perilous trip up a canal in boats that reminded me personally of a visit to the Mekong Delta, to schemes and conflicts involving the Empire’s own bank, the workshop/magical foundry that Yarrow is famous for, and an opponent possessed of prescience. Said opponent has some of the classic uses of the form--false identities, faked deaths, body doubles and more. And the actual inciting incident is that classic trope--a locked room mystery.

Ana does find herself, as the jacket cover suggests, with an opponent that can predict her every move. How does one beat someone who can see so many moves ahead? Therein lies the story. It’s a fair bit of puzzling and it is our slow understanding (as it is for Ana and Din) of the culture and society of Yarrow that keeps our investigators on their toes.

The question of award eligibility comes to a head here. Should a book be award worthy if it does not stand on its own? A Drop of Corruption most definitely extends the world, builds out Ana and Din more, and provides a whole new set of secondary characters who are fascinating and interesting (and not just our antagonist, once revealed). Ana as always remains a strange and sometimes alien person, it is Din who goes out into the world and has to be, for lack of a better word, a people person. Not that, especially when it comes to sexual relations, that Din is at all a wilting flower in this regard. But for all of that, does this book stand on its own?

No. I don’t think its reasonable for a reader to pick up this book, without having picked up The Tainted Cup, and get the full experience of what Bennett is doing. If your standards for award nomination is “the book stands on its own”, then A Drop of Corruption, as strong as it is, and as vibrant the characters are, the worldbuilding and the writing, does not pass that test. There are some hints here and there of the past, but this book assumes the reader knows about Din’s secrets, his debt, and already know that Ana is more than she appears (something reinforced here, but you are clearly meant to continue in a vein already known).

As a book, however, if you do not want to follow the rule of a book standing on this own, I think myself that A Drop of Corruption is among the strongest of the finalists. It does what The Tainted Cup does, but without having to set up the story and the problem, can really focus on a problem, an area, and a situation and really go into deep depth in it. Bennett is one of the more interesting fantasy authors out there today, and A Drop of Corruption proves just why.

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Highlights:

• Second Ana and Din mystery - does not stand on its own
• Interesting puzzles and an intriguing, frustrating antagonist.
• Deep worldbuilding, including crunchy thoughts on Empire

Reference: Bennett, Robert Jackson, A Drop of Corruption, (Del Rey 2025).

¹ A successor to Hadrian, Antonius Pius, tried to build a wall further north, in the area that is now Glasgow and Edinburgh. There are some remnants but that project was abandoned two decades after it was finished, and Hadrian’s Wall remained the furthest permanent projection of Roman power until the 5th century. There are some artifacts from the Antonine Wall fortlets in a museum in Glasgow.

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Series Review: The Amberlough Dossier, by Lara Elena Donnelly

A clear-eyed, relevant exploration of the tragic humanity of flawed people, flawed countries, and how impotence does not excuse wrongdoing

I picked up Amberlough, the first of Lara Elena Donnelly’s rich, thoughtful, and distressingly still-relevant trilogy of politics and style, because of the style alone. ‘Ooh,’ I thought, ‘Moulin-rouge-flavoured nightclubs with art-nouveau style, queer flamboyance, and a 1930s-bohemianism! Sounds like fantastic fun! Sign me up!’

And it was fantastic. The absinthe flowed, the nightclub performers danced and bantered and exuded fae-like glamours over their bewitched spectators. What is more, Amberlough city has a functional streetcar system, further adding to its already stratospheric base level of extreme sexiness. But was this series fun? Not really. Because fucking fascism always has to ruin everything.

This series is beautifully constructed in three parts: the fascist take-over, the resistance, and the aftermath. But where other writers might turn this into an inspiring, rah-rah tale of the RISING TO THE CHALLENGE and RESTORATION OF JUSTICE and EVERYMAN HEROES WILL TRIUMPH AGAINST EVIL THROUGH THE POWER OF COLLECTIVE ACTION, this series is decidedly more restrained. Everything is complicated. Everyone is complicated. There is hope for a better future, yes, but the flaws and constraints and uncountable opportunities to make the wrong choice temper that hope in a way that feels both realistic and depressingly relevant.

The story revolves around an interconnected ensemble of key players, who expand and contract in number throughout the series. In Book 1, Amberlough, we have Aristide Makricosta, a wildly popular, glamorous, (ageing) nightclub performer, who has, through a series of disagreeable compromises, entirely remade himself from a country boy of dubious ethnicity to the ne plus ultra of Amberlough nightlife. Cyril DePaul is a government agent who is simultaneously sleeping with Aristide and investigating him (not very effectively) for drug smuggling. Needless to say, this relationship necessitates a certain divide between work life and personal life. Finally, we have Cordelia Lehane, a stripper who works with Aristide at the nightclub. 

When the story begins, the nation of Gedda ---  a loose confederation of different regions, much like the UK --- is preparing for an election in which the governing party, a regionalist faction that favours backing off to let each region govern itself, is facing off against the rapidly strengthening One State Party or OSP. The OSP stands not only for a unified government, but a unified people, a unified culture, a unified ethnicity, a unified morality. People like Aristide, who work the wrong jobs, love the wrong type of people, and walk around with the wrong skin colour and shape of nose, face a rough future if the Ospies take over. And the Ospies have a good chance of it: When Cyril is sent to investigate the possibility of election fraud, they lose no time in finding his weak points and manipulating him to aid their efforts in rising to power.

In Book 2, Armistice, the action shifts to a different country of Porachis. Porachis has a subcontinental flavour, but it’s a subcontinent where British colonialism didn’t happen, and where Bollywood, not Hollywood, defines the international standard of film studio glamour. There, Cyril’s sister, Lilian DePaul, is working in the Geddan diplomatic office. Like Cyril, she is serving the Ospies, and like Cyril, they are enforcing her compliance --- in her case, by threatening her son. Yet Lilian is hardly a downtrodden victim here. She is very good at her job, highly respected in Porachis, and maintains access to her family’s inherited wealth. She may not like the Ospies, but she is doing well under their rule. Aristide, too, is making the best of matters. He has fled Gedda to land on his feet in the Porachin film industry, where he gains international acclaim and spends his time sleeping with handsome men much younger than him, drinking too much, and generally living the life of glorious public dissipation that often betokens internal emptiness and despair. Only Cordelia is suffering under Ospie rule, and only Cordelia has been doing anything about it.

In Book 3, Amnesty, the Ospies are gone, and Cordelia is a hero. Hooray! But that doesn’t mean everything is all right again. Are the heroes of the resistance the right people to lead a country once they’ve overthrown the government? Aristide and Lilian have returned home to Amberlough --- but how can you pick up the threads of your old life, when you and your home and all the people you once knew and loved have changed so much? And how can you build a future when the misdeeds of the past --- arms-dealing, drug-smuggling, collaboration with the enemy --- are brought into the open for some long-delayed justice? What value is there in justice, if it cannot bring back the dead, and serves only to hurt the living?

These books are profoundly melancholy, because they identify so precisely all the complications inherent in a story that a simpler book would present as a rousing, heartening, rallying cry to resist oppression and build a better world. Cyril and Lilian’s collaboration with the Ospies seems utterly unforgivable from the outside, the weak actions of weak people (especially Cyril --- oh, especially Cyril!) but when we see the story from inside their heads, it’s brutally clear why they act as they do. Aristide’s collapse into dissipation and despair is distressing --- but what would you do if you had clawed your way from the dregs of society into a moment of glittering triumph, only to have everything you’d built, and everyone you loved, ripped away from under you?

The set dressing of this story --- Art Deco Europe --- gives the rise of the Ospies a classic Nazi odour. But the book has more universal applicability than that. The publication dates (2017, 2018, and 2019) makes one suspect that a great deal of this series was inspired by living through the rise of the far right and the first Trump administration (although the parallels break down a bit now, during the second Trump administration, largely because the Ospies have much less interest in destroying science and medicine and general government function than MAGA). The agitations of regions wanting to break away from the central government give Brexit referendum vibes, or Scottish or Catalan independence. The complex relationships between certain regions within Gedda and other countries outside Gedda have a distinct whiff of Northern Ireland. And that’s not even leaving Europe! The reality is that every complex society will have its agitators against central authority, and authoritarian assholes are always lurking, eager to assume control. The central themes of this series, the flawed actors, the flawed governments, the flawed cultures, the flawed movements, are not specific to one point of time. They are universally, tragically, perpetually relevant. 

And what is worse, it remains unclear how much power any individual actually has to change anything. Would the Ospies still have come to power if Cyril hadn’t been coerced to aid them? Probably! Would there have been a resistance to bring them down if Cordelia hadn’t gotten involved? Maybe! Will Lilian be able to affect the form of the new government once the Ospies are gone? Who knows? This series is full of sympathetic, flawed humans, committing tragically understandable misdeeds, with no guarantee that anything they do matters. It is bleak. It is grim. It is complicated.

And yet: there is hope. The Ospies come to power, but they can be overthrown, and although we don’t know if Amberlough will find its way to a just future --- with or without Lilian’s involvement --- there is a path in that direction. People and society are complicated. The world of Amberlough is complicated. But so is ours; and it is a comfort to see these complications acknowledged on the page, without losing sight of the possibility of hope. 

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The Math

Nerd coefficient: 9/10, very high quality/standout in its category

Highlights:

• Complex people, complex setting, complex themes
• Glamour and style
• Melancholy
• Streetcars 

References:  

Donnelly, Lara Elena. Amberlough. [Tor 2017].

Donnelly, Lara Elena. Armistice. [Tor 2018].

Donnelly, Lara Elena. Amnesty. [Tor 2019].

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative or on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social.

Anime Review: Witch Hat Atelier

Children, magic, intrigue, and gorgeous animation in this coming of age adventure.

A girl on a quest to save her mother tries to unlock the secret power hidden deep inside her, but to do so she must be instructed by an unassuming magic teacher with an agenda of his own. The set up seems familiar, the story feels traditional. But, in Witch Hat Atelier the characters are intriguing and the animation is gorgeous. The tone of the show is a gentle complement to Frieren; Beyond Journey’s End. Even the English voice acting offers a nice change of pace with a range of accents and a subtly in the delivery that draws viewers in. This, along with the stylish character design and gorgeous background art make the soft vibes and periodic peril worth watching. The idea of cozy fantasy evokes storytelling that is focused more on quiet human interactions rather than the (also present) big magic battles. Witch Hat Atelier is that kind of friendship-focused story. 

Young Coco is a little girl who lives an ordinary life with her seamstress mother in a rural medieval-like village. In Coco’s world, witches are special magic experts who are able to help the rest of humanity with their supernatural skills. In most versions of witches, wizards, and mages magic is an innate skill that must be trained in the few who possess it. But in Witch Hat Atelier, there is a very big secret about magic, it’s based on drawing specific sigils and runes and, therefore theoretically anyone can do it. To keep magic from being abused, this truth is a closely guarded secret and any untrained people who stumble upon it get their memories erased. When the charming quirky witch Qifrey comes to visit Coco’s town an unknown spirit gives her a forbidden magic book that lets her in on the secret. Since she’s always desperately dreamed of being a witch she can’t help but test out the strange drawings in the book. But disaster strikes when her spell turns her mother into stone. Although protocol demands that Coco’s memories be erased, Qifrey has pity on her and decides to take in the now orphaned girl to teach her how to become a proper witch. Coco hopes that she can learn enough magic to break the spell on her mother and Qifrey hopes he can use Coco to find the evil “brimmed cap” witch who lured the child with forbidden magic. Qifrey takes Coco to his cozy but isolated atelier where Coco meets his other young students, the aloof Agott, friendly Tetia, and uptight Richeh. They are later joined by Qifrey’s magic instructor friend Olruggio. Coco struggles to keep up with the more experienced students and the group is periodically targeted by the evil witch league known as the Brimmed Caps who have an attachment to old, forbidden magic. The repeated presence of the Brimmed Caps or elements of forbidden magic lead the local magic law enforcement to suspect that Coco may be in league with the Brimmed Caps. But as the story progresses, viewers discover that Qifrey has a secret agenda of his own.

Witch Hat Atelier is distinctive for both its art style and its focus on children. Many anime adventures involve children who are somewhere in adolescence, at least in middle school or all the way to older teens. In Witch Hat Atelier the four girls are distinctly young, grade school age, although the medieval style setting makes the usual societal reference points less clear. The children are physically small, emotionally immature, and quite vulnerable despite their fledgling magical abilities. Having four little girls without a mother figure is an interesting choice that inherently creates its own baseline tension even as the larger adventures appear. There are male adults in the primary and supporting cast but there are almost no adult women characters other than the friendly mentor Alaira (who appears very briefly early and returns in the final episode) and there is a brief interaction with a nurse when Coco gets sick. The intrigue escalates as we learn more about the girls’ teacher, the charming and kind young man Qifrey. At first glance Qifrey seems older or age-ambiguous due to his white hair and spectacles, however it is quickly clear that he is a relatively young adult. The truth about Qifrey is also an intriguing mystery. He repeatedly demonstrates genuine concern for the well-being of his four little students, especially the new and naïve Coco. However, he intentionally keeps his children separate from the main, central atelier institution, and he engages in enough questionable behavior to make viewers wonder what exactly is going on with him. 

Despite the intrigue with him, the focus of the story is on the children, and on Coco in particular. If you don’t like little kids, especially sheltered naïve kids making poor choices, this may not be the right show for you. But the pacing is thoughtful and the vibe is reminiscent of a less murder-y Frieren or like a G-rated version of The Apothecary Diaries. Coco, as the main character, is sweet, gentle, good-hearted, and brave. But she is also naïve and careless in a way that may be age appropriate but is still frustrating to watch. Each of the children fit a particular personality extreme. Agott is the grouchy, aloof, loner. Richeh is kind, but uptight and oppositionally defiant. Tetia is the friendly, sensible, diplomatic, pleaser. Coco is the wide-eyed, brave, but naive optimist. Fortunately, her naïve sweetness is balanced by her significant cleverness and her insight into the feelings of others. A major part of her appeal is her effect on the other characters. Like Tohru in Fruits Basket, Coco is a child who, despite losing everything, is able to care deeply for others and help them make meaningful improvements in their world view. Coco and the grouchy Agott have a major character arc in the first season. However, my favorite interaction is Coco’s friendship with the young apothecary boy Tartah. The two of them are adorable in their childhood vulnerability and their mutual kindness to and inspiration of each other. Tartah is a particularly great side character who manages to be calm, practical, and insightful. He quietly observes much of what is going on when things are about to fall apart. And he is also the only character who catches on to Qifrey’s suspicious behavior but, nevertheless, is measured in his approach to investigating it. 

Despite the presence of adults in the story, the adventure is primarily from the point of view of the children and the tone is that of a coming of age adventure. Unfortunately, the first season of Witch Hat Atelier ends on quite a bit of a cliff-hanger that will have the anime-only viewers hurrying to grab a copy of the manga to see how things turn out. I did and it was quite worth it.

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Highlights:

• Cozy, kid focused content
• Gorgeous animation and character design
• Balance of cuteness and tension

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Reading the Hugos: Best Series 2026

Joe and Adi haven’t been able to do as much Hugos coverage as in past years, so I am taking on an overview of the books nominated for Best Series. This category is usually the one where it feels hardest to have a fully informed opinion! This year has 39 novels in the category, constituting 14,708 pages (without considering any of the short fiction also written in some of these worlds). And this year, nearly half of those novels (and the word count) are from the October Daye series, which has its sixth nomination for Best Series this year.

This year's set of nominations has a good mix of fantasy and science fiction. There are several very recognized authors on the list, but also a couple of newer writers. The nominees: 

Emily Wilde by Heather Fawcett (Del Rey US; Orbit UK)
October Daye by Seanan McGuire (Tor US; DAW)
Old Man’s War by John Scalzi (Tor US; Tor UK)
The Chronicles of Osreth by Katherine Addison (Tor US; Solaris UK; Subterranean)
The Craft Wars by Max Gladstone (Tor; Tordotcom)
White Space by Elizabeth Bear (Saga Press; Gollancz)

Emily Wilde:

 

The Emily Wilde series by Heather Fawsett has three books so far, with a fourth expected in 2027. The series focuses on a nineteenth-century Cambridge professor, the titular Emily Wilde, writing about the magical world around her. There's also a love interest, which the Goodreads copy describes as "her dashing and insufferably handsome academic rival Wendell Bambleby."

This series is the only one of the nominees that I completely could not get myself interested in. I do not vibe with books about eighteenth or nineteenth-century naturalists collecting data on the magical world. (I also bounced off of Marie Brennan’s Memoirs of Lady Trent series for the same reason.) As a former academic myself, bluntly: I find the portrayal of so-called genius scholars running around a magic-infused elite academia annoying. It’s so far from the realities of an academic career that, even though I know that fantasy novels about the fae are not here to accurately portray higher education, I just can’t get past it.

But I think it’s definitely a case of the wrong reader! People love this series. The first book in the series is a bestseller in the UK, US, and Canada. It got chosen as an NPR Best Book of the Year, A New York Times Notable Book, and was a finalist for the Goodreads Choice Awards and the Locus Award.

With only three books out so far, I think it's at a bit of a disadvantage in the competition, but it definitely has its fans.

October Daye: 

This series follows October (“Toby”), a half-fae changling and knight at a local fae court, as she navigates the complex politics of Fairie. Along the way, she makes friends and enemies as friends become enemies and enemies become friends.

If you do not like stories that center on elite bloodlines and who is the purest of the pureblood, this might not be the series for you. While Toby fights for changeling rights and recognition, refusing to kowtow to the rules of Fairie that say that the First Born and the Pure Bloods are the best, the special people in this world are usually special because of who their parents are.

But, at its heart, this is a very entertaining and diverting urban fantasy. Each book finds Toby facing new challenges (and sometimes it can feel like McGuire never gives her protagonist a moment of rest), solving new mysteries, and righting the past wrongs of Fairie. It's not quite a 'monster of the week' series, as it has a long and complex central storyline that gets twistier with each book.

Seanan McGuire’s October Daye series is the longest of all the nominees by a lot. It has nineteen books so far (book 20 is expected in September 2026) and a variety of short fiction set in the universe. This is its sixth nomination for Best Series. I kind of suspect that its fans will keep nominating it until it wins. 

Old Man’s War: 

The story of Old Man’s War begins with John Perry, a 75-year-old man on earth who enlists in the Colonial Defense Forces (CDF). The CDF is a completely independent authority and maintains ‘quarantine laws’ that keep the info about what’s happening in space fairly secret. They allow some people on earth to enlist at age 75; people know that they will be made young again, but are not sure how.

As a new recruit, Perry quickly learns about various alien species (and how to kill them) and about CDF technology and politics. The first book tackles themes centering on the ethics of extending life; questions about mortality and what makes one a human or individual; and issues related to colonialism and war. It’s a clear update to Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, where—to my great relief—Scalzi ditched the fascism and warmongering against aliens for the politics of a smart wifeguy curious about the universe around him.

As the series expands, we sometimes return to the life of John Perry, but we just as often get other stories in the broader universe. We learn much more about various alien species and the ways that the CDF has worked to keep earth isolated from the universe.

The Old Man’s War series is what started Scalzi’s career in Science Fiction and Fantasy. He began self-publishing the first book on his website chapter-by-chapter in 2002. It was popular enough that Tor gave it a chance: the first printing of the hardcover sold out in three weeks.

Scalzi has also used the series to explore writing from different perspectives and different ways of telling and releasing stories. While most of the books are told from a first person perspective, he tries out third person in Ghost Brigades (book 2). Books 5 and 6 (The Human Division and End of All Things) are both written from several different perspectives without a central plot and were released as digital serials before being collected into a novel for publication. And books 3 and 4 (The Last Colony and Zoe’s Tale) both have the same plot, but told from different character perspectives. Scalzi has talked about how writing Zoe’s Tale, which is told from the perspective of a 16-year-old girl, was a new experience for him.

Scalzi is a very successful and recognized SFF author: Redshirts won the Hugo for Best Novel in 2013 and Scalzi has, amusingly, won Hugos for Best Fan Writer (2008) and Best Related Work (2009) for his blog, "Whatever." While Redshirts remains very popular, I kind of want one of his more serious (only ‘more’ serious; Scalzi’s books are never completely serious) works to win a Hugo.

I have to admit that this is the series that I am hoping wins. I am a longtime John Scalzi fan, but I deeply prefer Scalzi’s space operas (Old Man’s War; The Interdependency) and mysteries (Head On; This Dispatcher) to Scalzi’s standalone “silly” books. I mean, I have read them all! But I prefer the former. 

The Chronicles of Osreth: 

This series is somewhat unusual. The Goblin Emperor is a fairly traditional high fantasy that pairs Byzantine style politics and court intrigue with issues of discrimination and its intersection with empire. But the book allows us to enjoy the real fantasy of what might happen if an actual good person got to be a leader and make reforms to a racist system.

The next three books are The Cemeteries of Amalo series: all mysteries set in the Elflands featuring Thara Celehar, a side character from The Goblin Emperor. Thara is a Witness for the Dead; he can experience the last few moments of a person’s life, which puts him in a position to investigate murders and right wrongs. Thara sometimes feels like an unlikely hero: an often-depressed gay man with intense internalized homophobia, he doesn’t seem to think he deserves good things. But he doggedly works towards justice and readers get to see him begin to find a family and friends for himself.

I totally missed this entire series when it came out; I had never heard of any of them. I was confused when I began reading it: I accidentally read The Witness for the Dead and the first third of The Grief of Stones before friends on Bluesky pointed out that I needed to read The Goblin Emperor first. 

But I inhaled the entire series in less than a week. Even though high fantasy is not always my jam, I found the protagonist of The Goblin Emperor and the spinoff with Thara incredibly compelling. 

The Craft Wars: 

The Craft Wars trilogy is another slightly confusing entry into the Best Series category. The Craft Wars are a trilogy set inside The Craft Sequence series, although the books of The Craft Sequence are not included in this nomination. (Max Gladstone has also announced that there will be a book 4 in The Craft Wars series.)

Book one, Dead Country, follows the protagonist from book one of The Craft Sequence, Tara Abernathy, as she returns to her home town to deal with her father’s death. There are magical raiders, hints of wars with the gods, and a powerful girl that Tara takes as an apprentice. Tara must deal with suspicions against magic workers among the general population, even from neighbors who knew her from childhood. 

While this series has been marketed as a standalone entry point for the broader Craft Universe, I think it’s hard to appreciate without the world building of The Craft Sequence series. Without that additional information about Tara and the world, Dead Country’s world building felt a bit thin to me. I had actually read the first couple of books in The Craft Sequence series but…forgot and didn’t realize they were connected to this new series. Once I did and connected the books in my head, a lot of Dead Country made a lot more sense.

You may also recognize Max Gladstone's name from This Is How You Lose the Time War, which he co-authored with Amal El-Mohtar (it won the Hugo for Best Novella in 2020). Were this nomination for all of The Craft Universe books (The Craft Wars and The Craft Sequence), I think it would stand a good chance of winning. But I think its nomination will be hampered by the fact that it’s only for the unfinished Craft War series.

White Space: 

 

This series is comprised of three books: Ancestral Night, Machine, and The Folded Sky, which all explore a far-future society in space. They do not follow one protagonist through a larger plot arc; instead, each book focuses on a separate character within the world. 

Book one follows Haimey, a salvager, who has found evidence of a crime and relics of an incredibly advanced ancient technology. Book two follows Dr. Jens as she tries to sort out a mysterious illness affecting both crew and the shipmind that may have been caused by ancient alien technology. And Book three follows Dr. Sunya Song as she leaves her academic career as a historian who travels across the galaxy to help with the archaeological retrieval of an ancient alien artificial intelligence called the Baomind.  

The books are tackling fascinating questions about artificial intelligence, how future humans might use medications and therapies to modify their own personalities and experiences with the world, and how future humans might grapple with the discovery of advanced alien tech. But, possibly because the universe is so complex and because the three books follow three different protagonists, I found myself really struggling to connect with the characters. I think this is a series that might require more than one read to be appreciated, which I am going to attempt to do (but probably not in time for Hugo voting this year!). 

My vote:

1. Old Man’s War
2. The Chronicles of Osreth
3. October Daye
4. White Space
5. The Craft Wars
6. Emily Wilde

POSTED BY: Christine D. Baker, historian and lover of SFF and mysteries. You can find her also writing reviews and editing at Ancillary Review of Books or podcasting about classic scifi/fantasy at Hugo History. Come chat books with her on Bluesky @klaxoncomms.com. 

TV Review: Maul: Shadow Lord

A fun space opera crime story that sneaks in a bit of commentary

I think it’s telling that both the Legends continuity and the Disney continuity of the Star Wars franchise both saw it fit to bring Darth Maul back from the dead. He was undoubtedly an imposing character. His lines were generic, sure, but Ray Park provided him with some great physical acting. He also got great makeup, great choreography, and a cool lightsaber. In the new canon, there’s a fair bit of him, but it’s spread among different shows and is difficult to track the whole way through. Now, though, he gets his own show to shine in, that being Maul: Shadow Lord on Disney Plus.

It’s only natural, I think, that the way Disney figured out how to let Darth Maul survive was to make him a crime lord. It’s a way of living that is both obviously cruel as well as opposing the power structure under which he lives. He can be cruel, raspy, imposing as he was in his appearance in The Phantom Menace, but with no need to follow pre-established rules on the nature of the Sith, nor any involving potential service to either side of the Clone Wars. This setup lets him be his own agent, beholden to only himself, free to be as ruthless as he can to entertain us.

One of this show’s strengths is its visual design. You are treated to a story set mostly in a single city on a single planet. The city has clear inspiration from Blade Runner with more obvious departures from reality. For an episode or two, I wondered if it were the same city planet as seen on a moon in The Mandalorian and Grogu but that turned out not to be the case. But as so many cities in science fiction are seen only at nighttime, advertisements glowing like gemstones against the dark, you also get to see the city in the day. It reminded me of some of the older parts of New York I’ve been to. Even better, you get a sense what it is like for the normal people of this city to live here. It seems to have a certain car (or speeder) dependence that makes commuting a chore, but it’s still a thing people not involved in high politics or crime experience - something that the Star Wars franchise historically has not been great about showing.

This is a crime show, and about half of it is a cop show. Other than Maul and his organization, the other major group of characters (barring an important duo) is this planet’s local constabulary. The investigator we follow, played by a suitably weary, suitably gruff Wagner Moura, is in some ways the platonic ideal of a cop show protagonist - divorced, teenage son, throws himself into his work in order to stay sane, but nevertheless with a moral core that will not let him take the easy way out of a morally difficult situation. Another character in the station is Two-Boots, a protocol droid adapted to police use whose programmed imperatives conflict with his own sense of duty.

In this section of the show, it will bring up inevitable comparisons to Andor. This isn’t Andor, and it was never going to be the deep dive into the nature of fascism that Tony Gilroy blessed us with. This show does, however, have its own element of commentary on the nature of imperialism that is hidden in the background, probably not intentional, and manifests itself in a way that may have simply been clumsy writing: whenever the Empire is mentioned, it is mentioned as a foreign entity, a thing that the characters very much do not identify themselves with. They don’t refer to the ISB, or any other named agency in the way that American cops in a mundane police drama may refer to the FBI, they refer to ‘the Empire’ as if they were not its own reluctant citizens.

This plotline, then, is an extended discussion of the nature of a political community. To play on an old Chinese saying: the galaxy is vast, and the Emperor is far away. The Empire, being a fundamentally personalist regime, cannot micromanage every city on every planet in every system in every sector. As such, it is easy for those who avoid attracting Coruscant’s attention to get away with a lot. The great mistake Two-Boots makes is assuming that the Empire exists to help people (and no I am not considering the Yuuzhan Vong here), and contacts Coruscant for assistance. The new Imperial presence spends its time terrorizing the city, caring far more about its sense of order rather than any actual care for the rights and livelihoods of its people. The commentary on the nature of fascism is rather blunt: these people are only using what ills you to gain power and to satisfy their own lust for domination. It is a lesson learned the hard way, both in this show and in our own world.

Maul’s operation and entourage, on the other hand, are not as rich. They are entertaining, certainly, pleasingly ruthless when dealing with other criminals who have crossed them. But just among them, and not their interactions with others, is rote: they are your typical space opera crime syndicate doing typical criminal things. This is where the connections to the broader franchise lore are the thickest, particularly near the end. It’s fun, yes, but it’s not particularly substantial. This segment of the story is the part most purely what people love Star Wars for, and it works on that level.

The other set of characters are two Jedi, master and apprentice, who happened to be on this world when Order 66 was issued and their comrades in the Order were duly felled. They are refugees, homeless, dispossessed by the change in regime and stranded on a world they barely know. To go on about their plight would spoil too much of what makes this story work as well as it does, but they are worth watching, too. They serve to reveal the nature of characters around them, for they elicit positive change in police characters and pure ruthlessness from Maul’s enterprise and from the Imperial forces that have come to impose their own will.

So, ultimately, no - Maul: Shadow Lord is not fundamentally another incisive commentary on the dangers of democratic backsliding. What it is is a fun space opera show with some thematic depth if you decide to dig in a bit. It is, satisfyingly, just a bit more than what we expected it to be, and I think, ultimately, that was enough. As a longtime Star Wars fan, I had fun with this show, and I think that other fans of this franchise will also have fun with it.

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POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy

Book Review: The Feywild Job by C. L. Polk

 A solid piece of D&D tie-in fiction; a missed chance for more

After the heights of 2nd- through 4th-edition Forgotten Realms tie-in fiction, where we got dozens of books across a quarter century, Wizards of the Coast seems to have gone into a bit of a lull in the setting over the decade since 5e bedded in (at least as far as characters not named Drizzt are concerned). That ‘90s TSR fiction is what I cut my fantasy nerd teeth on as a pre-teen and younger teenager; I have very fond memories of it. So I was pleased to see Wizards of the Coast return to tie-in fiction and return to a book set (at least partially) in the Realms. I was equally pleased to see they’ve tapped C. L. Polk, a writer with a great backlist, to write The Feywild Job.

The premise is that two pairs of adventurers are essentially blackmailed by a “client” into a reverse heist: steal a MacGuffin back from someone and return it to its proper place before anyone notices it’s gone. Each pair is led by half of an old duo of thieves—the warlock Saeldian and the bard Kell. That partnership fell apart a decade before the book started, when feelings started to develop between them. This was a problem for Saeldian’s warlock pact (the deal with an Archfey which gives him his powers), which requires him to never fall in love, so he walks out, and the next time he sees Kell is at the start of this heist. The two tagalongs are Kell’s orc druic companion Lorzok and Saeldian’s rogue companion Jubilee. This leads into a heist plot, a potential second-chance romance, and some very of-the-moment cozy-adjacent vibes.

A shift to cozy-adjacent romantasy might seem an odd choice for D&D tie-in fiction, but in a lot of ways I think it actually honours the tradition of the field. The heist-quest plot thread is absolutely classic TSR tie-in stuff. The point of tie-in fiction is at least in part to attract new audiences to the TTRPG product, and romantasy—and its audience—is a potential untapped market for WotC. And to dive into some deep lore, in fact one of the earliest examples of D&D tie-in was what we’d now call romantasy. A spinoff of the early ‘80s Endless Quest Choose Your Own Adventure books was 6 HeartQuest books. Before Drizzt, before the Dragonlance Chronicles, we had CYOA romantasy aimed at teenagers. So the choice of genre seems both perfectly judged for the current moment and a well judged nod to tradition.

And it all works quite well without being a total triumph. If I’d read this as a 13-year-old just realising he was queer at the height of TSR Forgotten Realms fiction, I’d have loved it. And it is a solid, largely well executed example of both a cozy romantasy and a piece of RPG tie-in fiction, but it isn’t more than that, either. I’d certainly put it in the top quartile of D&D fiction ever released, but with the greatest of respect, that isn’t the world’s most searching standard, and I don’t think it quite matches the absolute best of the old 2nd- to 4th-edition tie-ins (notably the best work of Erin Evans and Elaine Cunningham, for example). For the rest of the review I want to talk about why it reaches that upper quartile and why it also doesn’t, in my eyes, extend beyond solidly pretty good.

Polk is a technically excellent writer, and the prose in the book is very well done. A nice eye for imagery, a bit of personality to the narrative voice. One of the risks of D&D fiction is you can sometimes hear the dice rattling in the background, but the integration of spells, combat, and shared world elements is done seamlessly here—this may seem like damning with faint praise, but it really isn’t. It’s a key element of RPG tie-ins, and it is not often done as smoothly as Polk does it here. A number of the action set pieces are done very well, and the lick of horror imagery in the back half of the narrative is well judged and effective. Our non-binary lead in Saeldian is also written sympathetically and subtly. In a lot of ways The Feywild Job is a really good piece of writing in this genre.

But some of the bigger picture elements are not quite at the level of the sentence-by-sentence work. The major forward plot drive for the book is the heist element, and I really just wanted more of it: the planning, the traps, the complications. The first quarter of the book provides a bit of that, but for a book whose title creates an expectation for heist-heavy narrative, it was a little underdone. If you create the expectation, the reader (or I, at least), wants it to be fulfilled. What fills the narrative space not taken up by the heist is the second-chance romance plot between Saeldian and Kell, and unfortunately it doesn’t really compensate. For a romance of this type, understanding the nature of the first breakup, getting a good grasp on motivations and pining and missed opportunity is in my view essential to the whole thing working. And given the nature of that romance plot, the backstory is a little too thinly sketched to get the full effect. There are also a few misplaced details that just leave the break, and the level of bitterness being carried by both parties, feels a little contrived. Finally, for a book with four main cast members, the two leads’ companions are done a little dirty; both Lorzok and Jubilee have glimmers of real interest and very obvious possibility for more in Polk’s capable hands, but just don’t get the time or page space to be fully developed. The unrealised potential really does frustrate.

There is a place for 3-star fiction that doesn’t push—particularly when I was younger, I read a lot of it, I enjoyed a lot of it, and to a lesser degree I still do now. And The Feywild Job is firmly in that bracket. Perhaps because of the nature of tie-in fiction, perhaps because of the reasonably tropey cozy and romance elements, perhaps because of the combination between all of those and a moderately undercooked heist, it just doesn’t rise above it. It’s not a page count issue—it’s a reasonably typical length for this sort of book—but somehow it does seem to be trying to do a bit too much a bit too briefly.

Ultimately, if this is the quality of D&D tie-in we're going to get in the future, we should all be happy: it sets an enjoyable, highly competent standard. The Feywild Job is exactly what it needs to be. I just found myself the slightest bit disappointed it wasn’t more.

Highlights:

• Well crafted prose and engaging imagery
• Tie-in fiction which speaks to both tradition and the current moment
• Just a whiff of missed opportunity

Nerd coefficient: 6/10.

Reference:  Polk, C. L. The Feywild Job [Random House Worlds, 2026].

POSTED BY: Eddie Clark. Professional nerd by day, amateur nerd by night. @dreddieclark.bsky.social