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Science fiction’s most democratic awards ceremony will be free to watch anywhere in the world this Sunday, August 30, when LAcon V — the 84th World Science Fiction Convention, or Worldcon — streams its Hugo Awards live on YouTube at 8:00 PM PT from the Anaheim Convention Center. The five-day event opens this Thursday, August 27, at 7:30 PM PT, and the full finalist list spanning novels, films, and games — including Andor Season 2, Hollow Knight: Silksong, and Sinners — gives any reader a reason to pay attention even without a convention badge.
LAcon V runs August 27–31, 2026 at the Anaheim Convention Center and the adjacent Hilton Anaheim and Anaheim Marriott Hotels, presented by SCIFI Inc. a California nonprofit. This is the seventh time a Worldcon has been hosted in the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area and the fifth convention to carry the LAcon name; the convention’s mascot is Fuzzy, a Channel Island Fox native to the Southern California coast. Convention chair Joyce Lloyd described this year’s ballot as reflecting “the wide spectrum of contemporary science fiction and fantasy,” highlighting “established voices and emerging creators,” in April’s finalist announcement.
The 2026 Hugo Awards drew 1,488 valid nominating ballots from members of the 2025 and 2026 Worldcons, generating 23,543 nominations across 21 categories. That participation scale is worth pausing on: the Hugo Award is chosen entirely by fan members — no editorial panel, no corporate committee. Finalists are determined through a system called E Pluribus Hugo, a proportional vote-counting mechanism designed specifically to prevent organized minority blocs from dominating every finalist slot in a category, a reform adopted by the World Science Fiction Society in 2016 following a period of coordinated slate voting that dominated the ballot in 2015 and 2016. Winners are then selected by instant-runoff voting from the final ballot of six finalists. That voting closed August 8; the winners stay secret until Sunday night’s ceremony.
This year’s ceremony follows a difficult stretch for the Hugos. The 2023 Worldcon in Chengdu, China drew widespread condemnation after it emerged that Hugo administrators had excluded finalists — including Neil Gaiman, R.F. Kuang, and Xiran Jay Zhao — without public explanation, later revealed to be self-censorship intended to avoid conflict with Chinese government authorities. The following year in Glasgow, organizers disclosed that roughly 10 percent of final-ballot votes were fraudulent — purchased memberships used to benefit one finalist — costing the buyer an estimated £16,965 (approximately $22,040 USD at the time). LAcon V represents the first major US-hosted Worldcon since those events, with the 2026 ceremony administered by an independent California committee under full transparency commitments.
Full 2026 Hugo Finalist List: From Space Opera to Silksong
The Best Novel category features six titles covering a wide range of the current SF/F landscape: Robert Jackson Bennett’s A Drop of Corruption, Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Shroud, Alix E. Harrow’s The Everlasting, Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent, and Antonia Hodgson’s The Raven Scholar — all six confirmed finalists. Okorafor’s novel also won the 2026 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel earlier this year, making her one of the most closely watched contenders across the field.
Best Novella contenders include Annalee Newitz’s Automatic Noodle, Freya Marske’s Cinder House, Amal El-Mohtar’s The River Has Roots, Naomi Novik’s The Summer War, Olivia Waite’s Murder by Memory, and T. Kingfisher’s What Stalks the Deep — the full novella ballot — the last of which makes the convention’s Toastmaster, Ursula Vernon (who writes novels under the T. Kingfisher pen name), a finalist in a category she cannot win because she serves on the Hugo subcommittee. The convention has confirmed subcommittee members are fully ineligible this year.
Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form is where the list overlaps most directly with mainstream audiences. The six finalists are Andor Season 2 (Disney+), Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (Netflix), the animated KPop Demon Hunters (Netflix), Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, and James Gunn’s Superman — the complete Long Form ballot. The Short Form category features Murderbot (Apple TV+) with two nominations, alongside Severance, Doctor Who, Pluribus, and The Wheel of Time — the complete Short Form ballot.
Best Game or Interactive Work — a permanent Hugo category only since 2024 — offers what may be the ballot’s single most headline-grabbing nomination: Hollow Knight: Silksong, the long-awaited follow-up to Team Cherry’s acclaimed 2017 platformer — one of six game finalists. The full game category ballot includes Blue Prince, Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Dispatch, and Hades II. This category has only been awarded once as a permanent Hugo; the 2026 ballot is its second such presentation, making every winner a piece of award history in progress.
Best Poem returns for the second time — Seattle Worldcon 2025 presented the first ever under a permanent (if still trial) category framework — with six finalists including “Care for Lightning” by Mari Ness (Uncanny Magazine), “Hex Supply Customer Support Log” by Elis Montgomery (Strange Horizons), “How to Become a Sea Witch” by Theodora Goss (The Orange & Bee), “Landing: Seattle” by Brandon O’Brien, “The Mourning Robot” by Angela Liu (Uncanny Magazine), and “The World to Come” by Jennifer Hudak (Strange Horizons). The category’s return to LAcon V reflects a formal decision by the WSFS to continue it as a selected annual option, with ratification still pending at this year’s business meeting.
The Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book finalists include Suzanne Collins’s Sunrise on the Reaping (a Hunger Games prequel) and Tracy Deonn’s Oathbound, among others — the full Lodestar ballot. The Astounding Award for Best New Writer — which is not formally a Hugo but is presented at the ceremony — recognizes Sophie Burnham, Kamilah Cole, Antonia Hodgson, Molly O’Neill, H.H. Pak, and Jared Pechaček — the complete Astounding ballot.
E Pluribus Hugo: How the Award’s Voting System Actually Works
The mechanism that determines which works appear on the Hugo ballot is worth understanding precisely because it was built to solve a specific problem. Before 2017, a coordinated campaign with enough members could pack every finalist slot in a category with their preferred titles — and it happened. The 2015 and 2016 Hugos were dominated by two organized slates, the “Sad Puppies” and “Rabid Puppies,” which pushed works onto the ballot in categories across the board. The result was that several categories saw “No Award” win outright rather than bestow a Hugo on slate-placed works voters rejected.
The E Pluribus Hugo system, ratified by the WSFS in 2016 and first used in 2017, changed the nominations counting method to a proportional elimination process: nominees are eliminated one at a time, and each eliminated work’s votes are redistributed across the remaining nominees its nominators also listed. The effect is that a coordinated bloc can still get one or two works onto the ballot, but cannot monopolize all six finalist slots — broader community sentiment shapes the rest of the list. Winners on the final ballot are chosen through instant-runoff voting, in which voters rank finalists in preference order and the lowest-ranked options are eliminated iteratively until one work holds a majority of remaining support. The result is an award whose process is more technically sophisticated than almost any literary prize in the world — and one that has had to become that way in response to real organized interference.
Guests of Honor: A Roster That Runs From Starfleet to Deep Space
Ronald D. Moore serves as Media Guest of Honor, a choice that takes on particular weight at a convention celebrating Star Trek’s 60th anniversary. Moore wrote or co-wrote 27 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, including the two-hour series finale “All Good Things,” for which he won the Hugo Award in 1994. He later co-created the reimagined Battlestar Galactica (2004–2009) and the alternate-history space drama For All Mankind on Apple TV+ — the latter a show about a world where the space race never ended, placing Moore in an unusual position at a convention that also features a working NASA spacecraft chief engineer.
Barbara Hambly serves as Author Guest of Honor — a veteran novelist whose work spans the Darwath trilogy, the Benjamin January historical mystery series, and several Star Wars tie-in novels. Colleen Doran, Comics Guest of Honor, is the New York Times bestselling artist known for adaptations of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman stories and George R.R. Martin’s Tuf Voyaging. Dr. Anita Sengupta, Science Guest of Honor, is a rocket scientist and aerospace engineer known for her work on the Mars Curiosity rover’s supersonic parachute landing system. Tim Kirk, the five-time Hugo Award winner for Best Fan Artist, serves as Artist Guest of Honor. Geri Sullivan, Fan Guest of Honor, has been active in fandom since 1979. Stan Sakai, creator of the long-running graphic novel series Usagi Yojimbo, will attend as Special Guest.
Vernon, whose official Toastmaster page details her award history, writes novels under the T. Kingfisher name and will host the Hugo Awards ceremony as Toastmaster. She is a multiple Hugo Award winner in her own right.
Star Trek Is 60: Moore and the Woman Who Saved the Original Series
One of the convention’s most anticipated standalone events is the Star Trek at 60 program taking place Friday, August 28, celebrating six decades since The Original Series premiered on NBC in September 1966. The session will feature Bjo Trimble, the fan organizer whose 1968 letter-writing campaign convinced NBC to renew The Original Series for a third season rather than cancel it after its second — a campaign widely credited with establishing the template for organized science fiction fan advocacy. Joining her will be Rod Roddenberry, CEO of Roddenberry Entertainment and son of franchise creator Gene Roddenberry. Ronald D. Moore’s presence throughout the week as Media Guest of Honor adds a further layer to the 60th anniversary celebration: he spent years writing the franchise before departing to reinvent what television SF drama could look like.
NASA’s Europa Clipper, a CERN Tour, and Five Days of STEM Programming
The convention’s STEM programming extends well beyond the genre tradition of scientific speculation. NASA’s Chief Engineer for the Europa Clipper mission, Tracy Drain, will appear Saturday morning for a dedicated science session on the mission and Jupiter’s moon Europa. Drain, who has spent more than 25 years at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and holds an MS in mechanical engineering from Georgia Tech, described the Europa Clipper project in 2024 as “the first time ever we’re sending a spacecraft completely dedicated to studying this moon.”
The Europa Clipper launched October 14, 2024 aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center, and it is the largest spacecraft NASA has ever built for a planetary mission. Weighing approximately 13,000 lbs (5,897 kg), with massive solar arrays designed to generate power at Jupiter’s distance from the sun, it is now in transit along a trajectory of roughly 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion km). The spacecraft will make a gravity-assist flyby of Earth this December 3, 2026 — just months after LAcon V — before it arrives at the Jupiter system in April 2030. Once there, it will execute 49 planned flybys of Europa, studying the moon’s ice-ocean interface, surface chemistry, and geology to assess whether conditions suitable for life might exist in the vast liquid water ocean scientists believe lies beneath Europa’s frozen shell. Recent research published in January 2026 found that salty, nutrient-rich surface ice may actually sink through Europa’s shell and feed its subsurface ocean — though a separate study published in July 2026 cast doubt on whether the ocean conditions could support life as we know it, a live scientific debate the Clipper mission is specifically designed to resolve.
Attendees who cannot attend in person will have access to a CERN Virtual Tour on the convention program, offering an immersive look at the European Organization for Nuclear Research’s facilities. The STEM track also includes sessions on cell therapy, the climate polycrisis, and a popular workshop on medical accuracy in fiction — plus hands-on exhibits about the Channel Island Fox, the convention’s own mascot animal.
Over 1,000 Program Items Across Five Days
The LAcon V Program Division has scheduled more than 1,000 items across all five days, spanning literature panels, workshops, filk music, a Masquerade costuming competition on the Arena main stage, the Cabaret Stage at the Hilton Anaheim, and a full Film Festival in the ACC North building. A standout novelty: bestselling author John Scalzi will DJ a Friday night dance.
Literature programming covers science fiction, fantasy, horror, historical fiction, speculative romance, military science fiction, and poetry. The Transformative Works track addresses fanfiction, fan art, fan vidding, and fanzine traditions. A full Teen Program — designed and organized by a teenager himself — runs nearly 30 dedicated items across all five days, with writing workshops, a time capsule project, and gaming sessions on the fourth floor of the Hilton. The convention also includes an on-site Blood Drive in partnership with the SoCal Blood Bank, a Makerspace with electronics assembly workshops (including a custom LAcon V badge-building station), 3D printing, SCA medieval craft demonstrations, and Kaiju suit construction demonstrations.
The XPRIZE prize organization, known for technology challenge prizes, will have a dedicated program presence at the convention — an unusual crossover between SF fandom and real-world innovation competition.
How to Watch, Register, and What Comes Next
The Hugo Awards ceremony takes place Sunday, August 30 at 8:00 PM PT in the Anaheim Convention Center’s Arena, hosted by Toastmaster Ursula Vernon. It will be streamed free on YouTube on the LAcon V channel — no membership required to watch. The final in-person WSFS Business Meeting, at which 2028 Worldcon site selection results will be announced, takes place Sunday August 30 at 10:00 AM.
Registration for LAcon V remains open, with both full-weekend and single-day options available at lacon.org. Virtual membership provides access to streamed programming and online parties, including a digital gathering for the Dublin 2029 Worldcon bid.
The 85th World Science Fiction Convention will move to Montréal, Québec in 2027.
Frequently Asked QuestionsHow can I watch the Hugo Awards 2026 ceremony?
The ceremony will take place Sunday, August 30 at 8:00 PM PT at the Anaheim Convention Center and will be streamed free of charge on the LAcon V YouTube channel. No convention membership is required to watch the public stream. The awards will be hosted by Toastmaster Ursula Vernon (T. Kingfisher), herself a multiple Hugo winner.
What makes the Hugo Awards different from other literary prizes like the Booker or the Pulitzer?
The Hugos are chosen entirely by fans who purchase a membership in the World Science Fiction Convention — no panel of critics, no institutional jury. This democratic structure means the award reflects genuine popular taste within the SF/F community. The voting process uses two distinct mechanisms: E Pluribus Hugo, a proportional elimination system used during nominations to prevent any single faction from filling the entire finalist slate, followed by instant-runoff voting on the final ballot. A work that wins a Hugo has demonstrably earned the preference of a self-selected, engaged genre readership — making the award both more populist and, by most accounts, more commercially meaningful than panel-based prizes.
What is the Europa Clipper, and why is its Chief Engineer at a science fiction convention?
The Europa Clipper, launched in October 2024, is the largest spacecraft NASA has ever built for a planetary mission. It is currently en route to Jupiter’s moon Europa — a world scientists believe may harbor a vast liquid water ocean beneath its frozen surface — and will make a gravity-assist flyby of Earth this December 3, 2026, roughly three months after LAcon V, before arriving at Jupiter in 2030. Chief Engineer Tracy Drain is appearing at the convention because science fiction and space science have always been in dialogue: the genres that imagined ocean worlds help sustain the public interest that funds the missions. Drain will lead a Saturday panel discussing what the Clipper mission may find and what it would mean if it did.
Can I attend LAcon V remotely?
Yes. LAcon V offers a Virtual Convention Experience through its Member Portal, with streamed programming, virtual panels, and online parties. The Hugo Awards ceremony will additionally be streamed free to the general public on YouTube with no membership required. Registration for both in-person and virtual memberships remains open at lacon.org.