Allow me to make a small recommendation for the "best related work": Ada Palmer's 'Inventing the Renaissance.'
It's a fantastic work of complex history, told with the tools of science fiction and fantasy writing. But it remains a high quality academic work: the tools are used to unravel the telling of a gay and complicated topic, but you still get the vastness.
If you like ACOUP, it should be right up your alley.
The one that caught me off guard was Old Man's War by John Scalzi as best series.
> The Hugo Award for Best Series is one of the Hugo Awards given each year for science fiction or fantasy stories published in or translated into English during the previous calendar year. The award is available for series of science fiction or fantasy stories consisting of at least 3 published works totaling at least 240,000 words, with at least one work released or translated into English during the previous calendar year. A losing finalist becomes eligible again with the publication of at least two new works totaling at least 240,000 words.
And now, checking on it... The Shattering Peace was released in September of 2025.
I guess I've got another item for my reading list (currently going through the classics of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser... I wonder if that will ever be eligible for a retro Hugo Award for series).
Clair Obscur has great art (including music) but isn't a greater game underneath it. It's good but not exceptional. I can see the appeal for final fantasy fans, but I was underwhelmed.
Someone else mentions Blue Prince here. I think that's a much better game relatively speaking, even if not having Clair Obscur's exceptional art.
Which is too bad, because Blue Prince is the better game. :)
I'm playing through Clair Obscur now. It's above average for aaa stuff. But there are way too many cut scenes, and dodge/parry mechanics continue to be tedious. And the story is fine, but isn't really grabbing me. Sigh.
Blue Prince, on the other hand, is quite probably the best puzzle game I have ever played. My partner and I worked on it for months, and have a 50+ page Google doc of notes.
I am "only" a dozen+ hours into Clair Obscur, and I am similarly not understanding the hype. Combat is too gimmicky and annoying. The story is tonally all over the place. It starts out very dark, and then the characters seemingly have no problems going on stupid side quests because they want to see some cute elves or something. Are you saving the world or not?
The joke side quests work in your standard RPG because they take themselves less seriously. Your character is wielding an eight foot sword, the mage companion is a talking cat, and your boots are haunted by a long-dead Egyptian prince. Sure, go nuts if you want to play the mini-game at the circus belly-dancing competition to win the golden hat.
Clair Obscur starts in such a bleak, breathing world that the characters not treating the situation deadly serious breaks my connection to the world, so I start to focus more on the mechanical annoyances.
> worked on it for months, and have a 50+ page Google doc of notes.
That sounds more like a part time job than a game. I'm curious if you play it for the mental challenge? I feel challenged enough at $dayjob that all I want from games is mindless relaxation.
That's the beauty of Blue Prince. The core game doesn't require all of that. You can get to a satisfying ending with moderate puzzle solving. But after finishing the game, there are still hundreds of hours worth of optional puzzles left.
Yeah blue prince is three games (I've played two of them and won't play the third).
First, it's a really compelling roguelite puzzler where you explore and understand the house and it's mechanics. The puzzles are mostly small and straightforward (but not easy!). You can probably win this without taking notes. I found this part compelling and delightful.
Then it's something else where you learn about the world. The puzzles are more complicated and need notebooks and notes to keep the loose threads tracked. This part for me became a slog by the end and I finished mostly to say that I had.
To be sure, it was a couple few hours here and there, not at the scale of a job.
Blue Prince is an example of what fills are calling 'notebook games' -- instead of giving you lots of qol stuff, you just use a notebook to keep notes. The act of writing and arranging your notes is actually quite immersive. It's also fun!
Blue Prince has layers of puzzles and story... It's pretty reasonable to play to the credits, and not get into the depths of the post credits game; it's a very reasonable cutoff point for non-sickos.
I liked Clair Obscur a lot, but I doubt very much if I will ever replay it. The necessity of being able to dodge to survive encounters really killed the fun of the gameplay for me.
Taking about scifi, if you guys haven't watched the tv show SILO yet, I'd highly recommend it. Everyone I've recommended it to so far has been thoroughly impressed.
One of the best adaptations of a series to TV, up there with The Expanse and the like. I read the books after season 1, and still enjoy the show very much. They've taken some adaptation liberties, but they're fully supported by Hugh Howey and they make a lot of sense.
Sinners was a scifi movie...? About vampires in the past...?! Wild. Ditto for Claire Oscura: Expedition 33, which I thought was high fantasy / steampunk at most.
*EDIT:* It appears I'm just being silly, and the Hugos include fantasy. Ironically, the biggest fantasy series of our time by far has won 3 times in Novella form and once in TV form, but never the novels!
The difference between science fiction and fantasy was always only a tenuous distinction imposed by the few nerds who cared a little too much.
As we age out of being culturally relevant, and newer (likely less literate) generations take over the definitions will change, and perhaps should.
To me only hard science fiction will ever count, but I recognize that I'm in the minority there and also don't want to scare away the three remaining readers through gatekeeping.
Fantasys felt so lazy to me. Although sometimes I do enjoy the descriptions. But there is always an escape hatch out of a trouble and one that was not foreshadowed. It is constraints that makes things interesting and especially the higher order consequences of constraints and new tech.
A Song of Ice and Fire (contemporary writing I assume), it lost to Harry Potter book against one of GRRM’s best books/chance for win in novel category one year and Spin in another year(Accelerando was another nominee that year)
Surely on cultural impact Harry Potter has to win. While GoT had a decade flash in the pan, Harry Potter is still deeply in the cultural zeitgeist. "Muggles", "You're a Hufflepuff", etc have become cemented into our vocabulary.
GoT is undoubtedly more complex, interesting world, but it never had a generation of children reading the midnight book release. That the author actually penned the series finale is also worth something.
You're not the only one to be taken aback by that. Yes, the Hugos do fantasy, but I'm not sure I would have even thought to categorize Sinners as fantasy.
I mean, yes, it has vampires. Was From Dusk till Dawn fantasy?
But as a sister comment suggests, categorization is never easy, and probably just reinforced personal biases. (See Old Town Road being reminded from Billboard's country music list.)
There's more to Fantasy than a single boolean "does it contain something that is not real?"
Fantasy gets applied to the work as a whole, to its dominant tone and structure, not to one element. A work of fantasy usually has other elements that show it to be such. Is there world-building? Is it a quest or a hero story? Is there some kind of lore that grounds the whole universe? Not all of those are necessary, but usually you can clearly define the whole work holistically as Fantasy.
From Dusk till Dawn in particular is a straight crime thriller that turns into a horror movie.
Ok, I got nerd-sniped into trying to define Fantasy after saying I wouldn't.
I don't think crime thriller or horror have anything to do with if a story is fantasy. Alien is a sci fi movie and a horror movie. Psycho is a horror movie with no fantasy elements. Sinners is a fantasy horror movie. It sounds like you are talking about epic or high fantasy, but there is fantasy romance, fantasy detective, fantasy crime thriller etc. You can even have a fantasy sci fi movie like Star Wars.
I can envision a reasonable case that Star Trek is space fantasy, sure. But I think it's significantly overstating things to say that Trek is just as much space fantasy as Star Wars. There's nothing in Star Trek remotely as fantastical as the Force and the users thereof.
I agree the line between fantasy and sci Fi is very thin. In general I would say if the author intends for it to be a natural explanation like wormholes or something it's sci fi, if it's a magic teleportation spell it is fantasy. There is a series I read once Starships Mage which plays with this, it's hard sci fi for most things but magic exists and FTL is solved through teleportation. Everything non magic has to obey relativity and such.
I'd say that line can be blurred somewhat by "Blindsight". "Not real" isn't where I'd put the line, it's "not plausibly and consistently explained (or at least explained away) within the laws of nature.
Allow me to make a small recommendation for the "best related work": Ada Palmer's 'Inventing the Renaissance.'
It's a fantastic work of complex history, told with the tools of science fiction and fantasy writing. But it remains a high quality academic work: the tools are used to unravel the telling of a gay and complicated topic, but you still get the vastness.
If you like ACOUP, it should be right up your alley.
The one that caught me off guard was Old Man's War by John Scalzi as best series.
> The Hugo Award for Best Series is one of the Hugo Awards given each year for science fiction or fantasy stories published in or translated into English during the previous calendar year. The award is available for series of science fiction or fantasy stories consisting of at least 3 published works totaling at least 240,000 words, with at least one work released or translated into English during the previous calendar year. A losing finalist becomes eligible again with the publication of at least two new works totaling at least 240,000 words.
And now, checking on it... The Shattering Peace was released in September of 2025.
I guess I've got another item for my reading list (currently going through the classics of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser... I wonder if that will ever be eligible for a retro Hugo Award for series).
Clair Obscur is going to be game of the year every year for the next decade.
Clair Obscur has great art (including music) but isn't a greater game underneath it. It's good but not exceptional. I can see the appeal for final fantasy fans, but I was underwhelmed.
Someone else mentions Blue Prince here. I think that's a much better game relatively speaking, even if not having Clair Obscur's exceptional art.
Which is too bad, because Blue Prince is the better game. :)
I'm playing through Clair Obscur now. It's above average for aaa stuff. But there are way too many cut scenes, and dodge/parry mechanics continue to be tedious. And the story is fine, but isn't really grabbing me. Sigh.
Blue Prince, on the other hand, is quite probably the best puzzle game I have ever played. My partner and I worked on it for months, and have a 50+ page Google doc of notes.
I am "only" a dozen+ hours into Clair Obscur, and I am similarly not understanding the hype. Combat is too gimmicky and annoying. The story is tonally all over the place. It starts out very dark, and then the characters seemingly have no problems going on stupid side quests because they want to see some cute elves or something. Are you saving the world or not?
The joke side quests work in your standard RPG because they take themselves less seriously. Your character is wielding an eight foot sword, the mage companion is a talking cat, and your boots are haunted by a long-dead Egyptian prince. Sure, go nuts if you want to play the mini-game at the circus belly-dancing competition to win the golden hat.
Clair Obscur starts in such a bleak, breathing world that the characters not treating the situation deadly serious breaks my connection to the world, so I start to focus more on the mechanical annoyances.
> worked on it for months, and have a 50+ page Google doc of notes.
That sounds more like a part time job than a game. I'm curious if you play it for the mental challenge? I feel challenged enough at $dayjob that all I want from games is mindless relaxation.
That's the beauty of Blue Prince. The core game doesn't require all of that. You can get to a satisfying ending with moderate puzzle solving. But after finishing the game, there are still hundreds of hours worth of optional puzzles left.
Yeah blue prince is three games (I've played two of them and won't play the third).
First, it's a really compelling roguelite puzzler where you explore and understand the house and it's mechanics. The puzzles are mostly small and straightforward (but not easy!). You can probably win this without taking notes. I found this part compelling and delightful.
Then it's something else where you learn about the world. The puzzles are more complicated and need notebooks and notes to keep the loose threads tracked. This part for me became a slog by the end and I finished mostly to say that I had.
Then its a third thing for sickos.
To be sure, it was a couple few hours here and there, not at the scale of a job.
Blue Prince is an example of what fills are calling 'notebook games' -- instead of giving you lots of qol stuff, you just use a notebook to keep notes. The act of writing and arranging your notes is actually quite immersive. It's also fun!
Blue Prince has layers of puzzles and story... It's pretty reasonable to play to the credits, and not get into the depths of the post credits game; it's a very reasonable cutoff point for non-sickos.
I liked Clair Obscur a lot, but I doubt very much if I will ever replay it. The necessity of being able to dodge to survive encounters really killed the fun of the gameplay for me.
Taking about scifi, if you guys haven't watched the tv show SILO yet, I'd highly recommend it. Everyone I've recommended it to so far has been thoroughly impressed.
One of the best adaptations of a series to TV, up there with The Expanse and the like. I read the books after season 1, and still enjoy the show very much. They've taken some adaptation liberties, but they're fully supported by Hugh Howey and they make a lot of sense.
The Expanse was my favorite tv show! However with the latest season finale of season 3 of SILO, it may have become my favorite now.
Any other tv show recommendations? We seem to have similar taste.
Sinners was very cool but I'm surprised to find it as Hugo winner.
With the exception of that really cool scene in the middle, I found Sinners boring and forgettable.
Disappointed to see I already read the Hugo winner for best novel - The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow.
It is a worthy winner in my opinion. Fantasy with a sci-fi element along with a story which takes some untangling. Five stars from me :-)
Drive-by recommendation, not having read The Everlasting yet: The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez.
Sinners was a scifi movie...? About vampires in the past...?! Wild. Ditto for Claire Oscura: Expedition 33, which I thought was high fantasy / steampunk at most.
*EDIT:* It appears I'm just being silly, and the Hugos include fantasy. Ironically, the biggest fantasy series of our time by far has won 3 times in Novella form and once in TV form, but never the novels!
The difference between science fiction and fantasy was always only a tenuous distinction imposed by the few nerds who cared a little too much.
As we age out of being culturally relevant, and newer (likely less literate) generations take over the definitions will change, and perhaps should.
To me only hard science fiction will ever count, but I recognize that I'm in the minority there and also don't want to scare away the three remaining readers through gatekeeping.
Fantasys felt so lazy to me. Although sometimes I do enjoy the descriptions. But there is always an escape hatch out of a trouble and one that was not foreshadowed. It is constraints that makes things interesting and especially the higher order consequences of constraints and new tech.
Agreed. Fiction where the solution was "and then he found out he was the chosen one so magic happened" are unsatisfying.
What is the biggest fantasy series of our time?
A Song of Ice and Fire (contemporary writing I assume), it lost to Harry Potter book against one of GRRM’s best books/chance for win in novel category one year and Spin in another year(Accelerando was another nominee that year)
Surely on cultural impact Harry Potter has to win. While GoT had a decade flash in the pan, Harry Potter is still deeply in the cultural zeitgeist. "Muggles", "You're a Hufflepuff", etc have become cemented into our vocabulary.
GoT is undoubtedly more complex, interesting world, but it never had a generation of children reading the midnight book release. That the author actually penned the series finale is also worth something.
The Hugo voting is kind of skewed since it’s a membership thing where anyone can join but one has to be aware of it and care enough to join.
The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin
That one is great.
You're not the only one to be taken aback by that. Yes, the Hugos do fantasy, but I'm not sure I would have even thought to categorize Sinners as fantasy.
I mean, yes, it has vampires. Was From Dusk till Dawn fantasy?
But as a sister comment suggests, categorization is never easy, and probably just reinforced personal biases. (See Old Town Road being reminded from Billboard's country music list.)
I think by definition any vampire story is a fantasy story yes. Since vampires are not real and thus a fantasy creature.
There's more to Fantasy than a single boolean "does it contain something that is not real?"
Fantasy gets applied to the work as a whole, to its dominant tone and structure, not to one element. A work of fantasy usually has other elements that show it to be such. Is there world-building? Is it a quest or a hero story? Is there some kind of lore that grounds the whole universe? Not all of those are necessary, but usually you can clearly define the whole work holistically as Fantasy.
From Dusk till Dawn in particular is a straight crime thriller that turns into a horror movie.
Ok, I got nerd-sniped into trying to define Fantasy after saying I wouldn't.
I don't think crime thriller or horror have anything to do with if a story is fantasy. Alien is a sci fi movie and a horror movie. Psycho is a horror movie with no fantasy elements. Sinners is a fantasy horror movie. It sounds like you are talking about epic or high fantasy, but there is fantasy romance, fantasy detective, fantasy crime thriller etc. You can even have a fantasy sci fi movie like Star Wars.
>You can even have a fantasy sci fi movie like Star Wars.
And Star Trek.
I will die on the hill that Star Trek is just as much space fantasy as Star Wars.
I can envision a reasonable case that Star Trek is space fantasy, sure. But I think it's significantly overstating things to say that Trek is just as much space fantasy as Star Wars. There's nothing in Star Trek remotely as fantastical as the Force and the users thereof.
Vampires aren't any more fantastical than FTL travel, and yet we're perfectly happy to have that in SF.
I agree the line between fantasy and sci Fi is very thin. In general I would say if the author intends for it to be a natural explanation like wormholes or something it's sci fi, if it's a magic teleportation spell it is fantasy. There is a series I read once Starships Mage which plays with this, it's hard sci fi for most things but magic exists and FTL is solved through teleportation. Everything non magic has to obey relativity and such.
I'd say that line can be blurred somewhat by "Blindsight". "Not real" isn't where I'd put the line, it's "not plausibly and consistently explained (or at least explained away) within the laws of nature.
Culture is fluid, it must be to continue. Categories like this will evolve, expand, and shrink over time.
I'm comfortable considering horror as a subgenre of fantasy. Vampires and folklore and magic are staples of fantasy after all.
Snakes on a plane fantasy?
I'm comfortable considering horror a subgenre of fantasy when it incorporates explicitly supernatural elements.