Open Discussion — What's worth considering for the ballot in 2027?

The following list will be updated over the next few months as we read, watch, and listen to Hugo-eligible works for 2027. These are not necessarily what we plan to nominate, but rather works that at we enjoyed and believe to be worth consideration. We appreciate any additional suggestions in the comments.

Updated on March 27, 2026

Novel
The Subtle Art of Folding Space - John Chu

Sublimation - Isabel J. Kim

Ode to the Half-Broken - Suzanne Palmer

Novella

Obstetrix - Naomi Kritzer

Short Story

The River Speaks My Name by Ocoxōchitl la Coyota

Best Poetry

The Person Who Reminds the Other Person to Cast a Spell by Bogi Takács

Semiprozine

Strange Horizons

Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) 

"Matinee" (Wonder Man S01E01) - Written by Andrew Guest

"The Hedge Knight" (A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms S01E01) - Written by Ira Parker based on the work of George R.R. Martin

Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) ,

Small Prophets (BBC)

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die - written by Matthew Robinson and directed by Gore Verbinski

Best Editor - Long Form

Jenni Hill (Orbit Books UK)

Best Editor - Short Form

Scott H. Andrews

Emily Hockaday
Shingai Njeri Kagunda & Eleanor R. Wood

Fan Writer

Jacqueline Nyathi

Arturo Serrano
Brian Collins

Alasdair Stuart

Jason Sanford
Roseanna Pendlebury

Joachim Boaz

Runalong Womble

Alex Brown
Trish Matson

Fanzine

Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog

Journey Planet

Ancillary Review Of Books

Science Fiction Ruminations

Fancast

Hugos There

If This Goes On, Don't Panic

Skiffy and Fanty

Meal of Thorns

Fear of a Melmac Planet

In his Hugo-winning 1998 personal history of science fiction The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, Thomas M. Disch wrote “America is a nation of liars, and for that reason science fiction has a special claim to be our national literature as the art form best adapted to telling the lies we like to hear and to pretend to believe."

This observation rings troublingly true when it comes to immigrants and immigration. Science fiction has a long history of offering tales of lonely, lost aliens who build a new life for themselves on Earth and serve as thinly-veiled metaphors for foreign nationals who arrive at US borders.

Indeed, the lies some Americans tell about immigrants to their country can be seen writ large in their science fiction.

The sitcom Aliens in the Family featured an early
cameo by future star James Van Der Beek, who
ends up eaten by the family pet.
(Image via muppetwiki) 

There have been literally hundreds of published or performed stories about aliens lost on Earth, most of which serve as a parable about immigration in some way. Everything from The Cat From Outer Space, to the sitcom Aliens In The Family offers uncomfortable subtext about those uprooting themselves in search of a better life.

The trope has its origins in the late 1800s, with Thomas Blot’s The Man From Mars: His Morals, Politics and Religion, an odd little work that offers anecdotes about the strange customs of a highly advanced civilization. But the alien travellers of early utopian novels were generally used as a didactic tool to tell the reader what the “ideal” human society might look like. Just as importantly, these alien visitors were not planning to stay on Earth, and thus were portrayed as nonthreatening, long-term, to the country’s citizens.

Although not technically an alien, Valentine Michael Smith, the protagonist of Robert A. Heinlein’s 1963 Hugo winner Stranger in a Strange Land, was raised in a culture with different norms than those of contemporaneous Americans. Although some of the gender representation in the novel is highly questionable, the depiction of immigration is far more progressive than one might expect. Smith arrives on Earth, is relatively quick to understand local customs, and then offers valuable insights gained from his bi-cultural experiences.

Published just two years later, Walter Tevis’ The Man Who Fell To Earth also presents a parable about the threat of immigration, but interestingly the warning is about the danger to the immigrant. The novel portrays alien Thomas Jerome Newton as losing his culture, losing his way, and being utterly assimilated into a culture that consumes him. Likewise, Zenna Henderson’s “The People” stories, which feature a group of extra-terrestrial refugees living in an Anabaptist commune in Pennsylvania puts the focus on the difficulties these refugees face in their interactions with their Anglo-Saxon neighbors.

Every sitcom alien has a favourite
weird food. My Favourite Martian
ate gold.
(Image via moriareviews.com)

In more mainstream media, however, there are more troubling works. My Favourite Martian, which ran from 1963-1966, features a stranded extraterrestrial living in Los Angeles. The visitor, named Tim, leans into tropes that would become familiar in such sitcoms; weird foreign food, strange customs, and lack of understanding of normative US cultural practices of the era. Moreover, the series often features the extraterrestrial character only proving his worth through magical powers; leaning into the idea that a newcomer must go above and beyond to justify their presence and prove their harmlessness, or risk erasure.

Since the late 1970s, these stories have taken on a darker tone that aligns with right-wing narratives about migrants.

Depicting a lone alien stuck in Boulder, Colorado, the television series Mork and Mindy was one of the highest-rated comedies of the late 1970s. Featuring the late Robin Williams as the titular alien Mork from the planet Ork, much of the humour was derived from a sense of cultural dislocation. Although the series is gentler in its implicit xenophobia, it still depicts Mork the migrant as having less work ethic than his US counterparts, an inability to work well with authority figures, and difficulty understanding everyday life. It’s worth noting that Mork’s obsession with eggs may have been inspired by increased levels of migration from Mexico and Japan — those being the two countries on Earth whose citizens eat the most eggs per capita.

Another example of this type of narrative is The Brother from Another Planet, John Sayles’ 1984 cult classic about a Black-presenting alien fleeing from his erstwhile enslavers. Although the titular Brother is more of a refugee metaphor than an economic migrant like many of the others discussed here, the alien is presented as bringing value to the American community in which he finds refuge. Portrayed with empathy by Joe Morton, the alien Brother does not speak the language of his adoptive home, but the movie uses fewer problematic tropes than many contemporary works.

In the 1980s, prompted in part by the success of Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, there was a wave of stories about lost aliens on Earth. Given that it was a decade in which right-wing politicians weaponized economic uncertainty, job competition, and cultural change to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment, it is no surprise that many of these narratives display some degree of xenophobia.

(Image via alftv.com)

The television series ALF (an abbreviation of “Alien Life Form”) ran on NBC for four seasons from 1986 to 1990, with an additional television movie airing in 1996. Featuring an alien named Gordon Shumway from a planet named Melmac whose spacecraft crashes in California, the series focuses on the cultural clashes between Shumway and the family he ends up living with. Shumway becomes a safe proxy for otherness, allowing the show to make coded racist jokes without confronting prejudice directly. The alien is often depicted as lacking privacy boundaries, having a weird odour, and not always sharing American values — comedy that echoed the anti-immigrant talking points of xenophobic politicians like Jesse Helms. Notably, the alien’s culinary preference for eating peoples’ pets has a direct analogue in recent right-wing smear campaigns against immigrants in the Midwest United States. Much of the series’ framing normalizes exclusion while softening its impact through sitcom conventions.

It is worth noting however, that ALF does engage with the anxiety that many undocumented migrants face around law enforcement. A running theme within the series is that of a shadowy and malevolent government agency tasked with rounding up aliens and confining them in undisclosed locations under harsh conditions without benefit of due process. This fictional agency may have predated the real-world ICE, but it still resonates today.

As a story about an illegal migrant to the United States, the currently-airing series Resident Alien’s premise is steeped in xenophobia. The alien in question, Harry Vanderspeigle (Alan Tudyk) is sent to Earth to destroy all human life. Although the protagonist eventually rejects his original mission, this set-up still mirrors the reprehensible claims made by pundits that all or most immigrants hide harmful intentions. This is a propaganda-based narrative that clearly continues to resonate in too many countries. Fans of the show will defend the character of Vanderspeigle, noting that he ends up trying to assimilate to the broader American culture, but the fact that he is the only non-aggressive member of his species brings to mind the old racist trope of calling someone “one of the good ones.” Interestingly, Resident Alien creator Chris Sheridan is himself an immigrant, having been born in the Philippines before moving to the United States as a child.

Much has been made in critical analysis of science fiction of the relationship between the word Robot, derived as it is from the Czech word robota — literally forced labour. But the etymology of the word “Alien” is equally revelatory about the subtext inherent in our science fiction. The word came to English from Latin (by way of French), based on the possessive form of the word alius, literally meaning “other.” It seems fitting, then, that the majority of such stories connote the othering of migrants.

Science fiction does not just echo cultural attitudes toward migration, it helps to construct and normalize them, wrapping suspicion and exclusion in the comforting guise of entertainment. If, as Disch suggests, the genre is uniquely suited to telling the lies Americans prefer to believe, then serious questions should be asked about what the genre suggests about those who come to this planet in search of a better life. We might also question why stories about successful and mutually beneficial migration, celebrating diversity and inclusion, seem less likely to be published and performed.

The Compromise Candidate (Hugo Cinema 1990)

This blog post is the thirty-third in a series examining past winners of the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo Award. An introductory blog post is here.  

The 48th World Science Fiction Convention held in The Hague, Netherlands was the most international Worldcon to date. Fans arrived from 31 countries, flying in from five different continents. The United States still represented the largest number of attendees (1,618 fans from the USA), but as far as we can tell this was the first time that they were not an outright majority at the convention.

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen cost 
almost $50 million to make and earned
only eight million. It's chaotic, and far from 
Terry Gilliam's best work.
(Image via Variety)

There had been a sense in 1990 that the world had changed, and that science fiction was undergoing a dramatic shift in popularity. As August approached, registrants began to wonder whether they would be joined by fans from the former Soviet Union, since the Berlin Wall had fallen and more people would have the freedom to travel within Europe. In the end there were at least 21 fans at the convention from former Soviet republics.

Fans from the Anglosphere greeted the prospect of a more international Worldcon with optimism and positivity. In the lead up to the convention, Forrest J. Ackerman noted that, “this is truly an international gathering,” adding that he hoped to hear people in the hallways speaking Japanese, Russian, Finnish, and Hungarian. New York-based conrunner Neil Belsky, who had helped bring the con to the Netherlands, proclaimed that the convention’s attendees proved that the genre was transcending borders of language or culture. For example, there were discussions at the business meeting about creating a Hugo category for translated works. It’s worth noting that these reactions were markedly different from the xenophobia that had greeted the 1970 Worldcon in Germany, which had prompted a xenophobic backlash that had briefly excluded all non-English-language works from the Hugos.

With this evident uptick in interest from outside the United States, there was speculation that the Hugo ballot might see more works by international authors. But as per usual, category after category was dominated by American authors and fans, and just as predictably there was nobody from the winning movie on-hand to accept the award for best dramatic presentation.

Best Dramatic Presentation offered a smorgasbord of big-budget American Hollywood fare. The two highest-grossing movies of the year, Batman and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade had earned nods. Academy Award Best Picture nominee Field of Dreams was on the ballot, as was James Cameron’s underwater alien movie, The Abyss. Rounding out the list was box office disaster, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

It’s a mostly credible shortlist, with few real omissions. We might argue that Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure has had a greater cultural impact than a t least one movie on the shortlist. And writing in Critical Wave, Brian Aldiss complained that Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi’s comedy-drama My 20th Century deserved consideration, “especially after it won the Cannes Film Festival award.” Back To The Future 2, The Little Mermaid, and The Navigator all narrowly missed the shortlist. Critically ridiculed, The Final Frontier became the only Star Trek movie featuring the original cast not to earn a Hugo nod.

Terry Gilliam's filmmaking shows clear inspiration
from the work of previous Hugo-finalist Karel Zeman.
(Image via IMDB.)

Overall, we felt like the shortlist provides a fair representation of the year’s science fiction and fantasy cinema. And for perhaps only the second meeting of our cinema club, most members remember seeing many of these films in a theatre. The one movie that many of us felt was not worthy of nomination was Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. The long-winded movie introduces audiences to an aging fabulist who entertains children by recounting unbelievable exploits such as journeys to the Moon, getting swallowed by a sea monster, and being dragged across war-torn Europe with eccentric companions. Although the movie has moments that work, Gilliam’s self-indulgent flaws as a filmmaker are magnified by the chaos of the plot. Kim Newman of the fanzine Vector dismissed The Adventures of Baron Munchausen as an inconsistent and frustrating movie, and made an apt observation that the work owed an enormous debt to Czech filmmaker Karel Zeman. The gender representation is dreadful, as every woman in the movie is either a goddess, a temptress, or someone to be rescued. One can see the seeds of Gilliam’s more recent political statements in his earlier work.

Almost equally chaotic and stylized — but far more successful — was Tim Burton’s Batman. The highest-grossing movie of the year brought the comic book character to the big screen for the first time in almost 30 years. It succeeded largely on the charisma of its stars, a superb soundtrack, the exuberant production design, and on general vibes. But the plot — involving poisoned beauty products and some kind of city held hostage — is meandering and slightly confusing. However, this didn’t prevent the movie from hitting the cultural zeitgeist at the right moment, and its presence in both fandom and among the broader public was inescapable.

The only old-school science fiction movie on the shortlist this year may have been James Cameron’s The Abyss. Following the crew of an underwater mining operation who encounter alien life in the deepest parts of the ocean, it pits jingoistic militarism against American labourers and scientists. Some themes of the movie have aged well, but the gender politics surrounding the blue-collar protagonist Virgil (Ed Harris) and his ex-wife oceanographer Lindsey (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) are regressive at best. The fact that director James Cameron was in the middle of a divorce while making the movie is fairly evident. Contemporaneous reviews of the movie are unforgiving. David Ansen in Newsweek panned James Cameron’s underwater adventure: “The Abyss is pretty damn silly — a portentous deux ex machina that leaves too many questions unanswered and evokes too many other films.”

Field of Dreams may be the most Baby Boomer-coded
movie ever made, weaving in dozens of signposts
to historical events of particular significance to
those born in the USA between 1945 and 1960, including
a book banning scene in an elementary school.
It’s like someone tried to adapt Billy Joel’s
We Didn’t Start The Fire into a feature-length movie.
(Image via Film89.co.uk)

Based on a novel by Edmontonian W.P. Kinsella, Field of Dreams is an unusual inclusion on the Hugo Award shortlist — and one that was not without controversy. Following a farmer Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) who is guided by unseen voices that tell him to build a baseball diamond in his corn field, it’s a saccharine road trip through mystical Americana culminating in the resurrection of famous baseball players. At times, the corniness isn’t contained to the farming. Some contemporaneous fans seemed to think that it was “bereft of internal consistency, not science fiction, not a Hugo movie,” while others argued that the magical realism of the story made it award worthy. In his review, SFF author John Varley wrote, “Who is the voice? Shit, I dunno. I don’t care. There are so many possible interpretations of the impossible events, and the movie makes no attempt to favor any of them.” For all this, the movie remains intensely likeable and charming, though many of our cinema-watching group agreed that it did not belong on the Hugo ballot.

The final movie on the shortlist was the capstone of the Indiana Jones franchise: The Last Crusade. In this third outing for the swashbuckler, Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) teams up with his father Dr. Henry Jones (Sean Connery, best-known for starring in Zardoz) in a quest to retrieve the cup that Jesus Christ drank from at the last supper. What elevates the movie is a combination of chemistry between the two leads, a nice plot twist featuring love interest Elsa Schneider (Alison Doody), and a solid emotional core. Upon revisiting it, many of us felt that the movie has held up better than any other in the Indiana Jones saga; surpassing even the original. “To say that Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade may be the best film ever made for 12 year olds is not a backhanded compliment … more cerebral than the first two Indiana Jones films and less schmaltzy than the second, this literate adventure should make big bucks by entertaining and enlightening kids and adults,” Variety raved.

Interestingly, the 1990 Hugo Award race demonstrated the importance of ranked ballot voting, as Field of Dreams was well in the lead on the first ballot; receiving 110 first-preference votes to only 83 for Indiana Jones. But Field of Dreams was the second-preference movie for very few voters; picking up only one vote on the second ballot, and another 13 on the second ballot. Last Crusade, however, was a second choice for almost everyone, and earned the award as the compromise candidate; the movie that everyone liked, and few people rejected out of hand.

As the decade came to a close, the Hugos recognized probably the best science fiction or fantasy movie of the year, while offering a fairly reasonable short list that represented the preoccupations of fandom. It was overall a good year.