Hugo Predictions 2026

Sorry for taking so long to get these up. This post will serve as the ongoing prediction post for the next year until the finalists are announced in 2026. I’ll update monthly-ish.

These initial predictions tend to weigh heavily on an author’s previous record at the Hugo awards. Consequently, the top 6 novels are written by Hugo heavy hitters. It’s a stacked year for Hugo darlings and it wouldn’t surprise me if this ended up being the ballot, even with it being a whole year away, and even though some of these books haven’t even been published yet. When I posted my initial 2025 predictions way back in March 2024, two eventual Best Novel finalists (A Sorceress Comes to Call, and The Tainted Cup) and three eventual Best Novella finalists (The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, Tusks of Extinction,and The Brides of High Hill) were all on it. So I predicted almost half of the eventual finalists a year in advance. Let’s so how things shake out this year.

It’s hard to predict at what point authors will start declining nominations simply because they’ve received too many of them. In the past several years, Martha Wells, Ann Leckie, and Becky Chambers have all recused themselves at some point to share the love, basically. Obviously, it’s a personal choice, and every author will have their own philosophy on the matter, so maybe not worth speculating on anyway.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and make a gut prediction that Katabasis by R.F. Kuang and The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar will be the two winners come next August at LAcon V. Take that to the bank, folks.

Please feel free to drop comments or questions over the year!

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Methodology:

The model I use to make the predictions is continually a work in progress and I regularly train it to make it as accurate as possible (although at this point it’s all just very minor tweaks).

As a disclaimer, I’m not a coder and do not use any sophisticated programming. I’m a pseudo-statistician who has researched predictive modeling to design a formula for something that interests me. I first noticed certain patterns among Hugo finalists that made me think it would be cool to try and compile those patterns into an actual working formula. I use a discriminant function analysis (DFA) which uses predictors (independent variables) to predict membership in a group (dependent variable). In this case the group is whether a book will be a Hugo finalist.

I’ve compiled a database of past Hugo finalists that currently goes back to 2008. Each year I use a dataset that includes information from the previous 5 years to reflect current trends that are more indicative of the final outcome than many years of past data (Pre-Puppy era data is vastly different than the current Post-Puppy era despite not being that long ago.) I also compile a database of books that have been or are being published during the current eligibility year. Analyzing those databases generates a structure matrix that provides function values for different variables/predictors. My rankings are simply sums of the values each book receives based on which predictors are present.

In my 2025 prediction databases, I ended up with 365 novels and 119 novellas. I tracked 30+ predictors covering four general areas: “Specs” such as genre, publisher, and standalone/sequel; “Awards” meaning performance in other awards leading up to the Hugos; “History” meaning an author’s past Hugo history; and ”Buzz” such as inclusion on various reader lists, bestseller performance, and whether a book receives a starred review from a prominent publication.