WINNER: “Liecraft“, Anita Moskat, tr. Austin Wagner (Apex 10/7/25)
“Pollen”, Anna Burdenko, tr. Alex Shvartsman (Clarkesworld 3/25)
“Elasticity”, Andrés González Galante, tr. Lucy Corrie-Tannen (Samovar 10/27/25)
“Still Water”, Zhang Ran, tr. Andy Dudak (Clarkesworld 4/25)
“Zephyr”, Sofia Rhei, tr. Marian Womack (Samovar 4/28/25)
“Bodyhoppers”, Rocio Vega, tr. Sue Burke (Clarkesworld 2/25)
“Beyond Everything“, Wang Yanzhong, tr. Stella Jiayue-Zhu (Clarkesworld 1/25)
Best Artwork
WINNER: Nick Wells for the tesselated cover art of The Fractal Series (Flame Tree)
Jenni Coutts for the cover art of Dark Crescent by Lyndsey Croal (Luna Press Publishing)
Jenni Coutts for “Mushroom Fairy” (self-published)
Spencer Fuller for the cover art of The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar (Arcadia)
Sam Gretton for the cover art of The Salt Oracle (Solaris)
Tziano Zhou for “Highway Above the Clouds” (self-published)
Best Audio Fiction
WINNER: The Dex Legacy Series 3, Emily Inkpen (Alternative Stories)
Just Let Me Help, Tara Campbell (Space Cowboy)
Five Finger Stories, Rick Danforth (Tall Tale TV)
Unicorn Spotting, Rick Danforth (The Tiny Bookcase)
Wasteland: A Dex Legacy Story, Emily Inkpen (Alternative Stories)
The awards were voted on by members of BSFA and the British Annual Science Fiction Convention (Eastercon), except for Translated Short Fiction, which was selected by jury, and announced during Iridescence, this year’s Eastercon, held April 3-6, 2026 at Hilton Birmingham Metropole Hotel in Birmingham England and online. For more information, see the BSFA website.
This ballot is for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror works originally done in 2025 by Canadians. The Aurora Awards are nominated by members of the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association. The top five nominated works were selected. Additional works were included where there was a tie for fifth place. An online awards ceremony will be held on Sunday, August 9th, 2026, at 5pm EDT, with hosts Mark Leslie Lefebvre and Elizabeth May Anderson.
Note: Works are sorted by title. Voting will be done online by CSFFA members when they log into their account.
BEST NOVEL The Bewitching, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Del Rey Blight, Rachel A. Rosen, The BumblePuppy Press Direct Descendant, Tanya Huff, DAW Books The Downloaded 2: Ghosts in the Machine, Robert J. Sawyer, Audible Originals/Shadowpaw Press Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales, Heather Fawcett, Del Rey A Shift of Time, Julie E. Czerneda, DAW Books Written on the Dark, Guy Gavriel Kay, Viking Canada
BEST YOUNG ADULT (YA) NOVEL Breath of the Dragon, Shannon Lee & Fonda Lee, Wednesday Books Fireboy, Edward Willett, Shadowpaw Press A Lion’s Head, D.M. De Alwis, Ahasae Tharu Publications Minotaur, Jamieson Wolf, Rebel Satori Press One Morning Sun, Avi Silver, Molewhale Press Winging It, Jen Desmarais, Renaissance Press
BEST NOVELETTE/NOVELLA The First Thousand Trees, Premee Mohamed, ECW Press “In the Gardener’s Service“, Michèle Laframboise, Asimov’s, July/August “The Lure of Stone“, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Uncanny Magazine, Issue Sixty-Six A Palace Near the Wind, Ai Jiang, Titan Books The River Has Roots, Amal El-Mohtar, Tordotcom
BEST SHORT STORY “Hunted To Extinction“, Premee Mohamed, Gallery Books “I Ain’t Your Doll Face“, Jacqueline Thorpe, Polar Borealis Magazine #33 “the love song of house and lake“, Gillian Secord, On Spec Magazine, Issue #133 “The Stone Played at Tengen“, R.H. Wesley, Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 230 “What If We Kissed While Sinking a Billionaire’s Yacht?“, Rachel A. Rosen, Antifa Lit Journal, Volume 1
BEST GRAPHIC NOVEL/COMIC Atana and the Jade Mermaid, Vivian Zhou, HarperAlley “Bonds of the Forest“, Ally Rom Colthoff, Augur Magazine, Issue 8.3 It Never Rains, Kari Maaren, webcomic Questionable Content, Jeph Jacques, webcomic Shark Girl, Kate Beaton, Quill and Quire
BEST POEM/SONG “At the Spaceport Bar“, Lisa Timpf, Polar Starlight Magazine #17 “Bigfoot Farewell“, Carolyn Clink, Cryptids, Kaiju & Corn: Poems and Micro-Stories about Modern Midwest Monsters “Dragon Karaoke“, David Clink, Polar Starlight, Issue #18 “Explosive“, Derek Newman-Stille, Polar Starlight #20 “flowers without meadow“, Tiffany Morris, Eye to the Telescope #56 “From Dust“, J. Y. Zhang, Small Wonders
BEST RELATED WORK As the Earth Dreams: Black Canadian Speculative Stories, Terese Mason Pierre, House of Anansi Press Augur Magazine, Issues 8.1-8.3, Kerry C. Byrne, Toria Liao, André Geleynse, Kelley Tai, and Azure Arther On Spec Magazine, Issues #131 – 134, Vol 35, Diane L. Walton, Managing Editor, The Copper Pig Writers’ Society, Publisher One Message Remains, Premee Mohamed, Psychopomp Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction: Volume Three, Stephen Kotowych, Editor, Ansible Press
BEST COVER ART/INTERIOR ILLUSTRATION Dancing With the Holly King, Janice Blaine, On Spec Magazine, Issue #134 Seance, Alice M., Heartlines Spec, Issue 7 Lunar Base, Dan O’Driscoll, On Spec Magazine, Issue #132 Starship Librarians, Lorna Antoniazzi, Tyche Books Ltd. Listen to Me and I’ll tell You a Story, Ejiwa “Edge” Ebenebe, Uncanny Magazine, Issue Sixty-Six
BEST FAN WRITING AND PUBLICATION Amazing Stories online columns, Numbers 405-420, Steve Fahnestalk, AmazingStories.com Book Reviews in The Ottawa Review of Books, Robert Runté Polar Starlight Magazine, Issues 17-20, Rhea E. Rose, editor Speculative Poetry and the Hugos, Lynne Sargent, Strange Horizons Young People Read Old Science Fiction, James Davis Nicoll, online
BEST FAN RELATED WORK Can*Con, Marie Bilodeau, chair and Brandon Crilly, vice-chair, Ottawa Scintillation, Jo Walton and Rene Walling, co-chairs, Montreal Two Old Farts Talk Sci-Fi, Troy Harkin and David Clink, podcast Wizards & Spaceships, Rachel A. Rosen and David L. Clink, podcast, Night Beats The Worldshapers Podcast, Edward Willett
Finalists for the Hugo Awards, the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, and the Astounding Award for Best New Writer have been announced by LAcon V, the 84th World Science Fiction Convention. There were 1,488 valid nominating ballots received and counted from members of the 2025 and 2026 World Science Fiction Conventions for the 2026 Hugo Awards. Voting on the final ballot will open during May 2026. Members of the 2026 Worldcon will vote on the ballot, and the awards will be presented in Los Angeles at Worldcon on August 30, 2026.
“Missing Helen” by Tia Tashiro (Clarkesworld 7/25)
Best Series (687 ballots cast for 185 nominees)
The Chronicles of Osreth, Katherine Addison (Tor US; Solaris UK; Subterranean)
White Space, Elizabeth Bear (Saga; Gollancz)
Emily Wilde, Heather Fawcett (Del Rey US; Orbit UK)
The Craft Wars, Max Gladstone (Tor; Tordotcom)
October Daye, Seanan McGuire (Tor US; DAW)
Old Man’s War, John Scalzi (Tor US; Tor UK)
Best Graphic Story or Comic (362 ballots cast for 243 nominees)
The Invisible Parade, Leigh Bardugo & John Picacio (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers; Orion UK)
The Power Fantasy Volume 1: The Superpowers, written by Kieron Gillen, art by Caspar Wijngaard, lettering by Clayton Cowles (Image Comics)
A Wizard of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel, written by Ursula K. Le Guin, adapted & art by Fred Fordham (Clarion; Walker UK)
The Space Cat, written by Nnedi Okorafor, art by Tana Ford (First Second)
Absolute Wonder Woman Vol. 1: The Last Amazon, written by Kelly Thompson, art by Hayden Sherman & Mattia de Iulis, coloring by Jordie Bellaire, lettering by Becca Carey (DC Comics)
A Girl and Her Fed, written by KB Spangler, art by Ale Presser (agirlandherfed.com)
Best Related Work (479 ballots cast for 250 nominees)
“Ragnarök vs the Long Night”, Ashaya & Aziz (History of Westeros 8/10/25)
Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction, Paul Kincaid (Briardene)
Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia Butler, Susana M. Morris (Amistad)
Inventing the Renaissance, Ada Palmer (University of Chicago Press; Head of Zeus UK)
Last War in Albion: “The Cuddled Little Vice (Sandman)”, Elizabeth Sandifer (Eruditorum)
Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form (650 ballots cast for 149 nominees)
Andor (Season 2), written by Tom Bissell, Dan Gilroy, Tony Gilroy & Beau Willimon; directed by Ariel Kleiman, Janus Metz & Alonso Ruizpalacios (Disney+)
Frankenstein, screenplay by Guillermo del Toro, directed by Guillermo del Toro (Netflix)
KPop Demon Hunters, screenplay by Chris Appelhans, Danya Jimenez, Maggie Kang & Hannah McMechan; directed by Maggie Kang & Chris Appelhans (Sony Pictures Animation for Netflix)
Mickey 17, screenplay by Bong Joon Ho, directed by Bong Joon Ho (Warner Bros.)
Sinners, screenplay by Ryan Coogler, directed by Ryan Coogler (Proximity Media, Warner Bros.)
Superman, screenplay by James Gunn, directed by James Gunn (DC)
Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form (471 ballots cast for 249 nominees)
Doctor Who: “The Story & the Engine”, written by Inua Ellams, directed by Makalla McPherson (BBC One, Disney +)
Murderbot: “All Systems Red”, written by Paul Weitz & Chris Weitz, directed by Roseanne Liang, based on the book All Systems Red by Martha Wells (Apple TV)
Murderbot: “The Perimeter”, written Chris Weitz & Paul Weitz, directed by Paul Weitz, based on the book All Systems Red by Martha Wells (Apple TV)
Pluribus: “We Is Us”, written & directed by Vince Gilligan (Apple TV)
Severance: “Cold Harbor”, written by Dan Erickson, directed by Ben Stiller (Apple TV)
The Wheel of Time: “The Road to the Spear”, written by Rafe Lee Judkins, directed by Thomas Napper, based on the book The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan (Amazon Prime Video)
Best Game or Interactive Work (357 ballots cast for 159 nominees)
Blue Prince, developed by Dogubomb, published by Raw Fury
Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, developed by Jump Over the Age, published by Fellow Traveller
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, developed by Sandfall Interactive, published by Kepler Interactive
Dispatch, developed & published AdHoc Studio
Hades II, developed & published by Supergiant Games
Hollow Knight: Silksong, developed & published by Team Cherry
Best Editor, Short Form (305 ballots cast for 128 nominees)
Scott H. Andrews
Jennifer Brozek
Neil Clarke
Lee Harris
Michael Damian Thomas
Sheila Williams
Best Editor, Long Form (234 ballots cast for 95 nominees)
Carl Engle-Laird
Jaymee Goh
Lee Harris
Jenni Hill
Joe Monti
Diana M. Pho
Best Professional Artist (228 ballots cast for 220 nominees)
Lulu Chen
Kelly Chong
Dave Kellett
Tran Nguyen
John Picacio
Tom Roberts
Best Semiprozine (324 ballots cast for 93 nominees)
Escape Pod, editors Mur Lafferty and Valerie Valdes, assistant editors Kevin Wabaunsee & Phoebe Barton, hosts Tina Connolly & Alasdair Stuart, producers Summer Brooks & Adam Pracht, and the entire Escape Pod team
khōréō, team khōréō (publisher Aleksandra Hill; editor-in-chief Zhui Ning Chang; editors Kanika Agrawal, Danai Christopoulou & Isabella Kestermann; audio Jenelle DeCosta, E.B., Aaron Kling, Grayson Norman & Lian Xia Rose; marketing M.L. Krishnan & Ashley Thompson; art Ambi Sun; copyeditors Ariya Bandy, Eleanor Glewwe, Jeané Ridges & Derek Yen; proofreader Cyrus Chin; first readers Adialyz Del Valle Berríos, Sanjna Bhartiya, Kelsey Costa, Merulai Femi, A.R. Frederiksen, Yuvashri Harish, Zohar Jacobs, Lynn D. Jung, Phoebe Low, Katie McIvor, Adil Mian, Katarzyna Nowacka, A.W. Prihandita, Helena Ramsaroop, Jin Hui Saw, Aditya Sundararajan, Sophia Uy, Madeleine Vigneron, Aaron Voigt, K.S. Walker, Akilah White, MJ Woods, Kelsea Yu, Lilia Zhang & Tina Zhu)
On Spec, publisher Copper Pig Writers’ Society; managing editor/art director Diane L. Walton; poetry editors Colleen Anderson & Bob Stallworthy; fiction editors Lareina Abbott, Ashley Alton, Barb Galler-Smith, Dan Gyoba, Matthew Stobie Jackman, Constantine Kaoukakis, Alyssa Kulchisky, Susan MacGregor, Jade Mah-Vierling, Ann Marston, Krystle McGrath, Cheryl Merkel, Virginia O’Dine, Kathleen Phul, Thomas Schwarz Lorina Stephens, William Thompson, Amanda Wells, Jessica Zdril & Ethan Zou;interviewers Roberta Laurie & Cat McDonald; proofreaders Isaac Calon, Mya Colwell & Ashlin McCartney
Strange Horizons, the Strange Horizons Editorial Collective
The Deadlands, publisher Sean Markey, editor-in-chief E. Catherine Tobler, poetry editor Nicasio Andres Reed, nonfiction editor David Gilmore, necromancer Amanda Downum, art director Cory Skerry, copyeditors Laura Blackwell & Annika Barranti Klein, proofreader Josephine Stewart, designer Christine M. Scott, social media skeleton Felicia Martínez
Uncanny, publisher and editor-in-chief Michael Damian Thomas; managing editor Monte Lin; poetry editor Betsy Aoki, podcast producers Erika Ensign & Steven Schapansky
Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book [Not a Hugo Award] (244 ballots cast for 169 nominees)
Among Ghosts, Rachel Hartman (Random House Books for Young Readers)
Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe, C.B. Lee (Feiwel & Friends)
Holy Terrors, Margaret Owen (Holt; Hodderscape UK)
Oathbound, Tracy Deonn (Simon & Schuster)
Sunrise on the Reaping, Suzanne Collins (Scholastic)
They Bloom at Night, Trang Thanh Tran (Bloomsbury US; Bloomsbury UK)
Astounding Award for Best New Writer [Not a Hugo Award] (290 ballots cast for 156 nominees)
Sophie Burnham*
Kamilah Cole*
Antonia Hodgson
Molly O’Neill
H.H. Pak*
Jared Pechaček*
*Finalist in their 2nd year of eligibility.
The following nominees received enough votes to qualify for the final ballot, but were found to be ineligible:
Best Series: Lady Astronaut, Mary Robinette Kowal (fewer than 240,000 new words since last appearance on the ballot)
Best Series: The Singing Hills Cycle, Nghi Vo (fewer than 240,000 words in total)
Astounding Award: Silvia Park (had qualifying publication prior to 2024)
Astounding Award: Barbara Truelove (had qualifying publication prior to 2024)
The following nominees received enough votes to qualify for the final ballot, but declined nominations:
Best Editor, Long Form: Lindsey Hall
Best Semiprozine: Beneath Ceaseless Skies
The following nominee received enough votes to qualify for the final ballot, but was withdrawn by the showrunners to abide by the limitation on number of episodes of the same show allowed in the category.
Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: Murderbot: “Free Commerce”
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The top ten awards finalists in each category are:
SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS
The Folded Sky, Elizabeth Bear (Saga; Gollancz) amazon / bookshop
Icons of the Fantastic: Illustrations of Imaginative Literature from the Korshak Collection, Amanda T. Zehnder & David M. Brinley, eds. (University of Delaware Press) amazon / bookshop
NON-FICTION
The Outspoken and the Incendiary, Terry Bisson (PM) amazon / bookshop
IN MAY 1976, when Thomas Burnett Swann died of cancer at 47, fantasy was a new genre.
Only a decade before, in 1965, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings had exploded to bestseller status with the publication of the trilogy’s first mass-market paperback editions (the hardcovers had been a minor success in 1954–55). Boomer youths adopted Tolkien’s fantasies as watchwords for ecological consciousness, anti–nuclear proliferation, the struggle against industrialism and capitalism, and much more. “Frodo Lives!” and “Go Go Gandalf!” were printed on buttons and graffitied on New York subways.
Publishers read the signs: readers wanted more of whatever Tolkien was. Of course, novels like The Lord of the Rings had been around for decades, and Tolkien had his own influences: William Morris, George MacDonald, Lord Dunsany, even H. Rider Haggard. In the United States, a pulp tradition of weird fiction and the sword and sorcery genre had thrived in the 1930s and ’40s, and science fiction magazines published fantasy stories as a minor part of their output, even as they pretended only to value the “seriousness” and “realism” of SF.
But fantasy had yet to emerge as its own category, free from SF’s shadow. There were few generic expectations and no agreed-upon canon to unite the genre; the field was understood, very simply, as stories of the “impossible,” contra the supposed plausibility of SF. Things changed when Ballantine Books sought to capture the Tolkien market by republishing dozens of earlier (and a handful of contemporary) American and British authors in a series of “adult fantasy” books. The Ballantine Adult Fantasy series published 65 books between 1969 and 1974, giving the genre a canon and a horizon of expectations, as well as a visual language for covers and shelf awareness for books with “fantasy” printed on their spines. By 1977, following the publication of Tolkien’s posthumous The Silmarillion, Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara, and Stephen R. Donaldson’s Lord Foul’s Bane, all of which were bestsellers, fantasy was undeniably a well-established category in the publishing world. And by 1980, just about every publisher had a line of fantasy novels.
Thomas Burnett Swann’s literary career coincided with that tumultuous decade of fantasy’s “genrefication.” Swann was the son of a wealthy Florida citrus baron; he was also a Korean War veteran, an English professor at Florida Atlantic University with five monographs to his name, and an invalid for the last decade of his life. When Swann is remembered at all, though, he is best known not for his scholarship or his poetry chapbooks but as the prolific, Hugo-nominated fantasy author of 16 novels, two story collections, and over a dozen short stories.
Swann was a prolific and provocative writer of romantic, often subtly queer, historical fantasy novels that offered glimpses into imagined pasts of gentle heroes and melancholy heroines. His novels, published between 1966 and 1977, collectively told the “secret history” of how the mythological “prehuman” peoples—centaurs, fauns, dryads, minotaurs, and more—were driven into extinction and memory by the barbarity of humanity. Swann recast the rise of human civilization as a tragedy, marking the loss of an antediluvian world of sexual freedom, gender egalitarianism, and unabashed queerness. His legacy was an impressive body of work that crafted a new, fantastical vision of human history by rewriting ancient myths, and it was so unique in the emergent landscape of 1960s and ’70s fantasy that it beggared comparison and occasionally courted controversy.
But a half century after his death, Swann is—unfairly—a mere footnote in the history of fantasy.
¤
In 1974, Donald A. Wollheim, SF editor and founder of DAW Books, fought with his distributor, New American Library (NAL), to release a queer retelling of the biblical story of Jonathan and the shepherd youth who would eventually become King David. Though NAL initially meant to ban How Are the Mighty Fallen from distribution, they ultimately relented, and Swann’s eighth and most (in)famous novel was published. Swann’s story of a bisexual David and a gay Jonathan drew on the author’s own reading of the biblical text and on his belief, repeated time and again across his novels, that queerness was a natural part of ancient cultures. In his interpretation, this reality was ultimately suppressed by Christianity and its bastardization of the true religion, that of the goddess of love. For all the controversy it caused by presenting, indeed celebrating, a romantic and sexual gay relationship, How Are the Mighty Fallen was typical of Swann’s oeuvre.
When How Are the Mighty Fallen was published in the spring of 1974, Swann was at the height of his career as a fantasy writer, but he’d begun writing professionally decades earlier with the collection of lyric poetry Driftwood (1952). Swann wrote Driftwood during his time in the navy, between performing clerical work and corresponding with SF fans and writers, among them Ray Bradbury. Discharged from service, Swann traveled by boat to Asia and the Mediterranean, and continued to write poetry, producing three more collections and placing poems in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Ladies’ Home Journal. He completed a PhD in literature in 1960, resulting in his first monograph, a book on the modernist writer H.D.
For the remaining 16 years of his life, Swann alternated between university teaching, extended periods of travel and research, and serious bouts of illness, all while writing—not just poetry and his many fantasy novels but also monographs on poets including Christina Rossetti, Ernest Dowson, and Charles Sorley. By 1970, Swann was seriously ill from what he described as persistent urinary tract infections, but which later turned out to be terminal cancer. He complained that his illness was “something so utterly inelegant,” not like “Keats with his consumption” or “Browning with her mysterious malady.” He resigned from teaching, broke off his engagement to the scholar Ann Peyton, and moved to Tennessee to write fiction full-time.
Nearly all of Swann’s output as a fantasist was written in the final six years of his life, between 1971 and 1976, and four of his 16 novels were published posthumously. His first story for an SF magazine, “Winged Victory,” appeared in 1958. It presages the writer Swann would become and hints at the kinds of critiques he would receive. Set in 306 BCE, the story tells of a sculptor’s commission from the King of Macedonia, which is interrupted when the island is visited by “the gods in a sky-chariot.” But the chariot is a spaceship and the gods are a pair of bug-like humanoid aliens, one of whom becomes the sculptor’s model for the now headless Winged Victory of Samothrace statue on display in the Louvre.
Many of the signatures of Swann’s later fantasy novels are present in “Winged Victory”: a thematic focus on love, beauty, women’s sexuality, and sexual freedom; romantic and sexual desire crossing boundaries between species; and a narratological insistence that the story is a secret, “true” history of the ancient past. At the same time, the story sometimes evinces the flaws Swann’s critics would bring up again and again: that his writing was “slight,” “saccharine,” and, worst of all, “Disneyfied.” Missing is Swann’s sense of critique, so palpable in his best novels, especially his discontent with civilization and heteropatriarchy—sensibilities honed in later novels and present, in muted form, as early as his first, Day of the Minotaur (1966).
Swann continued to write short fiction in the early 1960s and cut his teeth publishing in the British magazine Science Fantasy, where he became a regular feature alongside New Wave writers Michael Moorcock and J. G. Ballard. He later wrote for the prestigious American magazine Fantasy & Science Fiction. Although novels made up most of his fantasy writing, Swann continued to write short stories and novellas throughout his career. One of his best was also the last published in his lifetime—“The Night of the Unicorn” (1975), which tells the story of an aging, retired Mexican sex worker who encounters a unicorn, that symbol of purity and youth, on the tourist beaches of Cozumel. Swann had a hard time getting the attention of book publishers, but after being nominated for a Hugo Award for short fiction in 1963, Swann made the acquaintance of Wollheim, who was then an editor at Ace Books.
Wollheim kick-started Swann’s career as a fantasy novelist in 1966 by publishing Day of the Minotaur, a novel that depicts the last minotaur and the prehumans’ exodus from Bronze Age Crete following violent attacks by human outsiders. Wollheim had sparked the Tolkien craze a year prior, seizing on a copyright loophole and publishing “pirated” mass market editions of The Lord of the Rings. Of course, Tolkien sued, and before the year was up, Ballantine Books released the official mass-market paperbacks, but Wollheim continued to look for opportunities to exploit the growing interest in fantasy. Swann didn’t write Tolkienian epic fantasy, but his thematically rich historical fantasies clearly resonated with readers. He received a Hugo nomination, for example, for his novella “Where Is the Bird of Fire?” (1962), which retells the Romulus and Remus myth with Swann’s anti-civilization twist, framing the founding of Rome as a tragedy. Following Day of the Minotaur, Wollheim published three more of Swann’s novels at Ace before departing in 1971 to found DAW, where he published another seven novels by Swann.
Though hardly Swann’s best novel, Day of the Minotaur was nominated for the 1967 Hugo for best novel alongside an impressive roster that included Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17, Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon, and Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (which ultimately won). Day of the Minotaur was the first novel set in Swann’s prehuman storyworld, a loose series that ultimately comprised over 2,500 pages spanning thousands of years of (pre)human history, from the banks of the Nile in third millennium BCE Egypt (1976’s The Minikins of Yam) to the farthest outposts of the British Empire in the Caribbean during the waning years of the Victorian era (1971’s The Goat Without Horns). Swann’s brand of fantasy had its detractors, but he also built a loyal fan base and quickly developed a positive critical reputation: his fiction was nominated for at least 11 SF and fantasy awards between 1963 and 1977.
Swann’s growing recognition in the insular SF and fantasy fandom of the early 1970s caught the attention of Betty Ballantine, and she published two novels by the author, beginning with one of his worst books, the Gothic pastiche The Goat Without Horns. That story centers on an educated English youth sent to instruct the daughter of an eccentric widow on a remote Caribbean island, where she is threatened by a cartoonishly evil Carib king, who turns out to be a wereshark. Surprised by its poor reception, Swann complained in an interview that few realized The Goat Without Horns was a satire, his version of Northanger Abbey (1817), but there’s very little satirical about it, and the whole thing is made all the more awkward because the narrator is a dolphin. But Ballantine was seemingly undeterred by the racist would-be satire or its poor reviews and published one of Swann’s greatest achievements the following year.
Wolfwinter (1972) is often described as Swann’s novel about Sappho, but the queer poet only plays a minor, if thematically significant, role in the story. More than anything, Wolfwinter serves as a meditation on what Swann’s critic-biographer Robert A. Collins called “the bittersweet temporality of love.” This theme emerged in Swann’s oeuvre as early as his second novel, The Weirwoods (1967), an affecting, melancholy tale of love, personal transformation, and political uprising set in ancient Etruria, and the theme intensified as his illness worsened in the 1970s. In Wolfwinter, Swann reimagines his fauns, who until then had been portrayed as mischievous lechers at best, standing in for Swann’s caricature of beatniks in The Forest of Forever (1971), and as serial rapists at worst, in Green Phoenix (1972). Now, they emerged as noble beings, made all the more romantic for their short lives, aging seven years for every human year.
Wolfwinter is the achingly beautiful story of a woman’s self-fashioning through the trials of an unwanted marriage, unplanned motherhood, and life-giving love with the faun Skimmer. So great is Erinna’s love that Hades takes offense and claims her as his own: “[Your sin] is monstrous. You have ignored me. […] You have loved a Faun who, briefer than a man, has dared to live as if he would never die. You have desecrated my name.” And so great is her love that Aphrodite intervenes, chiding the underworld god: “I know how you stole your bride from the fields of Enna because no goddess would willingly yield the sun to dwell in your windowless towers. You shall not steal a second bride.” Wolfwinter is Swann’s most romantic novel, a declaration that love exists beyond time, that it may pass quickly or last a lifetime, but that, however it comes, it leaves us forever changed. The novel is also a subtle celebration of queerness, not only due to its thematization of Sappho’s poetry but also because Erinna’s story of triumphant love is told as a lesson to a young man grieving his dead male lover.
In the years that followed Wolfwinter and before his death in 1976, Swann was absurdly productive and published nine novels (five of those in 1976 alone). His most significant novels in this later period were How Are the Mighty Fallen, Will-o-the-Wisp (1976), and Lady of the Bees (1976). These were not just Swann’s best-written novels, evincing a writer whose prose combined poetic grace, emotional depth, and wildly inventive storytelling, but his most thematically significant and critically cutting novels as well. Swann’s later novels are simpler and less explicitly about the conflict between human and nonhuman, civilization and nature, that explicitly animated his earlier writing. His later fiction, following Wolfwinter, could be glossed as a prolonged meditation on love and grief. At the same time, Swann’s more intense focus on love in later years seemingly freed his fiction to make sharper judgments about the world around him.
Swann’s best-known novel, How Are the Mighty Fallen, presents an openly gay relationship not as an anomaly but as a natural truth, described by the biblical character Jonathan’s goddess-worshipping mother, Ahinoam, Siren of Crete, as “one more affirmation of [her] divine plan, the tide which rises and falls to the moon’s compulsion, the inevitability of the seasons, the certainty that those who love will meet, after death, in the Celestial Vineyard.” Though it was typically unrequited, gay desire was a part of Swann’s fiction from the very beginning. Swann held nothing back in How Are the Mighty Fallen: “A man’s love for a man is neither more nor less than a man’s love for a woman, it is only different,” Ahinoam declares (a sentiment repeated by Swann’s version of Virgil’s Dido in the posthumous Queens Walk in the Dusk from 1977).
Readers, of course, took the hints from Swann’s writing that he was himself gay. To one friend, he described How Are the Mighty Fallen as his most personal book. To another, he explained that he hadn’t married because no woman would allow herself to come second to his writing, his true love. But letters and articles in fanzines of the late 1970s, written by those who knew the author, are full of innuendo and euphemisms that hint at Swann’s sexuality. Some have even recognized Swann as a lost gay genre writer. Most recently, in a 2020 issue of Foundation, SF writer Geoff Ryman recounted Swann’s influence on his own self-discovery decades earlier, while reading “The Manor of Roses” (1966; later expanded into 1976’s The Tournament of Thorns), a story of unrequited, inexplicit, but unsubtle gay desire.
Whatever Swann’s sexuality, the love between the half-Siren Jonathan and the future king David in How Are the Mighty Fallen is among the most romantic Swann wrote. The novel burns with scenes of longing, fleeting glances and overwhelming desires that culminate explosively, tenderly, and sexily in a tragic romance—one foredoomed by Jonathan’s fate in the biblical text. How Are the Mighty Fallen also characterizes the desert god Yahweh as a petty, jealous figure of masculine oppression; under his religion, queerness is unnatural and illegal. But for the goddess, queerness is a manifestation of her love and, like all love, is salvific. Jonathan’s queer love for David opens the way to the Celestial Vineyard, a heaven long denied the Sirens for their betrayal of the goddess centuries earlier.
Swann’s idea of the goddess and of her opposition to the violent, masculinist Yahweh/God is developed in later novels, especially Will-o-the-Wisp and the much less impressive The Gods Abide (1976), as a critique of Christianity, heteropatriarchy, and empire. One of Swann’s most bizarre creations, Will-o-the-Wisp is set in the early 1600s and offers an origin story for the Puritans. In Swann’s telling, Puritans were once a race of woodpecker people dwelling in Dartmoor who lost the ability to fly as humans encroached ever deeper into Britain. Later, the Puritans were shamed into believing they were demons by Christian proselytes. In self-hatred, Swann’s Puritans exported their vision of Christianity to the rest of the world through colonial endeavors like the founding of Plymouth Colony. Despite the initial “what the fuck?!” of this premise, Will-o-the-Wisp nevertheless serves as an effective and damning critique of the systemic oppression thriving at the intersection of patriarchy, religion, and empire.
By recasting the myth of the Pilgrim—in the year of the nation’s bicentennial, no less—in Will-o-the-Wisp, Swann implicates what the Right might call “American Christian civilization” in an oppressive lineage dating back thousands of years. Lady of the Bees, Swann’s best novel next to Wolfwinter, tells another part of that story: the foundation myth of Rome by the twins Romulus and Remus. Published the month of his death, Lady of the Bees—which expands the novella “Where Is the Bird of Fire?”—was regarded by Swann as his best work. The story presents two competing visions of humanity’s future: Remus’s gentle, loving, just society, where prehumans and humans live in harmony, and Romulus’s violent rule of the strong over the weak, of humanity’s subjugation of nature. Romulus is petulant, brutish, and misogynist; in the end, he kills Remus by accident, in a petty fit of rage, and promises his brother’s companion, a faun, that they will build an empire fitting both visions. But what follows—the city, the empire, the civilizations built in Rome’s image—is ultimately a tragedy, even as Remus’s vision lived on in gentle men like Swann.
In the most impressive novels of his career, Swann’s critical insights matched those of the decade’s greatest SF and fantasy writers. Like Ursula K. Le Guin, Tanith Lee, and Samuel R. Delany, Swann wrote novels of stunning depth and golden prose that did for 1970s fantasy what the New Wave did for SF. Whatever his sexuality and politics, Swann’s fantasies spoke to the feminist, gay rights, and environmental movements. His intense focus on “civilization” processed the growing sense of cultural malaise and crisis in the mid-to-late 1970s: the years of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, of stunning stagflation and economic insecurity, of neo-imperial failures and excesses. These realities of daily life for many Americans raised the cynical question “Civilization! What is it good for?” But the question is never cynical in Swann’s writing. It is, instead, an appropriate question, one that recognizes the injustice of the forces comprising and structuring the amorphous conditions of life we capture and allegorize in that word, “civilization.”
While Swann’s early novels staged his critique of civilization through the simple ecological allegory of city versus forest, minotaur against man, or the human and the nonhuman, his later novels grew increasingly interested in the structures of violence that staged such conflicts in the first place. Swann denounced the injustice of oppression and enslavement, the abnormality of patriarchy, the grotesqueness of normative masculinity, and the violence of homophobia. He didn’t always get it right—some of his novels are downright racist, and his characterizations of women are occasionally sexist. At the same time, for all his flaws, Swann’s fantasy novels of noble fauns, tragic dryads, and gentle heroes spoke truth to the forces authorizing all of these structures: the terrifying power exercised by kings, states, religions, and all those who turn a blind eye to the injustice in their midst.
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Writing in his regular review column for The New York Times in September 1974, SF author and critic Theodore Sturgeon characterized Swann’s writing with effusive praise that spoke to his elusive vision of fantasy: “He writes blissfully and beautifully separated from trend and fashion; he writes his own golden thing his own way.” When Swann died two years later, he was considered one of the most important living fantasy writers in the United States. The very idea of a “fantasy writer,” an author whose work belonged to and shaped the genre, had only just emerged by the end of Swann’s too-short career.
Had Swann survived, he might have shaped fantasy indelibly—the genre might have looked different in the 1980s and ’90s, and might have expressed a greater objection to the mainstream of Tolkienian epics. Might have, could have, possibilities—Swann wouldn’t have liked that. He would have us love his work for what it was, “his own golden thing,” written in time but also standing outside it, touching readers beyond his death. Today few writers claim him as an influence, few have imitated his style in the decades since his death, and most of his novels are out of print (a few are available in digital editions through Wildside Press).
And yet, somehow, fantasy fiction today looks a lot like what Swann wrote. Fantasy in the 2020s is dominated by retellings of ancient myth, many explicitly feminist and queer, and the genre has taken a turn toward romance, as expressed in the popular cross-genre portmanteau “romantasy.” Just as Madeline Miller and Sarah J. Maas are of our time, Swann’s writing was quintessentially of his time, even as he wrote against the grain of the genre’s emergent forms. But Swann speaks to us across and out of time, and, if we have the eyes to see, we might find his Bird of Fire—his Remus, transformed, a symbol of hope, justice, and gentleness—burning in the sky.
• Tomatoes: 2.5kg (approx. 5.5 lbs) of Italian peeled tomatoes (e.g., San Marzano or standard Italian peeled) [00:21].
• The Sofrito: 1 carrot (skin on), 1 celery stick, and ½ medium onion [00:50].
• Herbs & Seasoning: A large bunch of fresh basil, extra virgin olive oil, sea salt, and black pepper [01:00].
• Liquid: A small splash of water (only for blending the Sofrito) [03:52].
Cooking Instructions
1. Prepare the Ingredients
• Blend the Tomatoes: Use a hand blender to gently blend the canned peeled tomatoes directly in the can or a bowl until smooth [01:21].
• Creamy Sofrito: Roughly chop the onion, celery, and carrot. Place them in a blender with 7–8 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil and a splash of water. Blend until it reaches a completely smooth, creamy consistency with no chunks [02:38, 04:16].
2. Cook the Sofrito
• In a cast iron or heavy-bottomed pot over medium-low heat, add 2 tablespoons of olive oil and the creamy Sofrito [05:05].
• Cover with a lid and cook gently for about 10 minutes. Stir occasionally and add a splash of water if it starts to look dry; it should darken in color but not burn [05:23, 06:27].
3. Simmer the Sauce
• Add the blended tomatoes to the pot with the Sofrito. Stir well to combine [07:02].
• Cook on low heat for 1 hour with the lid on to retain moisture [08:34, 09:18].
• Tip: Stir every 10 to 20 minutes to ensure it doesn’t stick [09:11].
4. Season and Finish
• After 1 hour, remove the lid. The sauce should be thick and rich [10:04].
• Add sea salt and a generous amount of black pepper to taste [10:46].
• Add Basil: Turn off the heat or remove the pot from the stove. Tear the fresh basil by hand and stir it into the sauce. Note: Do not boil the basil, as it destroys the delicate flavor [11:26, 12:10].
5. Serving and Storage
• The sauce is ready to use immediately, but for maximum flavor, let it rest or sit overnight [12:17].
• Storage: Store in the fridge for 5–10 days or freeze in airtight containers or Ziploc bags [12:48].
In this video, Chetna Makan shares her recipe for a delicious Cauliflower and Chickpea Curry, a perfect weeknight meal that is thick, flavorful, and incredibly satisfying.
Ingredients
• Vegetables: 1 large cauliflower (cut into small florets), 2 roughly chopped onions, 200g frozen peas [00:55, 07:24].
• Finishing Touches: 1 tsp honey (or brown sugar), 1 large tbsp dried fenugreek (kasuri methi), a splash of double cream (2-3 tbsp), and fresh coriander [07:59, 08:34].
• Other: 2-3 tbsp olive oil and approximately 300-400ml water [01:06, 05:38].
Cooking Instructions
1. Sauté Aromatics: Heat the oil in a pan. Add the mustard and cumin seeds. Once they sizzle, add the chopped onions and cook for 6-7 minutes until they are nicely golden [01:19, 01:30].
2. Add Ginger & Garlic: Stir in the grated ginger and garlic and cook for 1 minute [02:06].
3. Prepare the Sauce: Pour in the tomato passata and about 100ml of water. Cover and let it simmer on medium heat for 10 minutes to allow the base to thicken and cook through [02:14, 02:46].
4. Spice it Up: Add all the dry spices (salt, turmeric, chili powder, coriander, garam masala, and amchoor). Stir well [04:28].
5. Cook the Cauliflower: Add the cauliflower florets and about 200-300ml of boiling water. You want enough liquid to cover the cauliflower but not so much that it becomes watery. Cover and cook for about 10 minutes until the cauliflower is almost tender but still has a slight bite [05:16, 07:07].
6. Add Remaining Veg & Protein: Stir in the frozen peas and the drained chickpeas. Increase the heat slightly to bring everything back to temperature [07:24, 07:45].
7. Final Seasoning & Finish: Add the honey (to balance the acidity of the tomatoes), dried fenugreek, and most of the fresh coriander. Pour in the double cream for richness and stir everything together [07:59, 08:34].
8. Serve: Garnish with the remaining fresh coriander. This curry is perfect served with chapati, paratha, naan, or rice [09:53].
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