Craft Series for Best Series Hugo, pass it on
Hugo nominations for LA WorldCon are open now! The Craft Sequence and Gladstone are eligible for several categories, so if you are a WSFS member and able to nominate, please do consider:
The Craft Sequence for Best Series
Dead Hand Rule for Best Novel
Max Gladstone’s newsletter “The Third Place” for best related work
Carl Engle-Laird for best Editor (Dead Hand Rule and others)
I am probably also eligible for a fan writer or related work piece, but frankly I don’t really understand the different fan categories and won’t get enough nominations so don’t really care.
The Craft Sequence narrowly missed out on being nominated for the past two years. It’s a travesty. Let 2026 be our year! Also, I have emailed the Hugos team about whether it should be Craft Sequence or Craft Wars, and they said Craft Sequence.
You already know I think the Craft Sequence is pretty damn good, and well deserving of the Hugo for Best Series. I mean, look at *gestures around* the whole fansite thing. And the fact one of my walls is has a massive conspiracy theory style wall connecting characters together. I own at least five copies of each book. I have personally purchased ebooks for half a dozen friends.
The whole point of the Best Series Hugo is to celebrate a series that is greater than the sum of its parts, and that is precisely what the Craft Sequence is. Each instalment slots together, building a bigger and stronger whole as it goes. Whether your particular love is character, prose, plot, worldbuilding, or theme, the Craft Sequence taken as a whole develops each of these elements as it goes, creating an extremely satisfying whole.
But I’m biased. So let’s ask some other people.
(Disclaimer. I didn’t ask them. These are from publicly available reviews, blurbs, social media posts.)
(Also some are from older books not the recent ones, but relevant because Best SERIES.)
Liz Bourke is an active and engaged critic in the field of science fiction and fantasy, and Hugo nominee for Best Fan Writer and Best Related Work for her reviews, columns, and 2017 book “Sleeping With Monsters.” What does she have to say about the Craft Sequence?
The characters are compelling, the worldbuilding batshit and complex and lush in the way I’ve come to expect from a Gladstone book.
Max Gladstone just keeps getting better. It doesn’t quite seem fair. If you’re not reading his Craft sequence? Start.
John Wiswell has written some of my favourite works in recent years (can’t wait for the The Dragon Has Some Complaints); he’s a scifi author who has won the Nebula Award and Locus Award twice, and been a finalist for Hugos and more! He’s mentioned the Craft Sequence a few times but this sums it up:
The Craft Sequence by Max Gladstone encroaches on my brain on a daily basis.
Same, John. Same.
Publishers Weekly is a major industry publication that has reviewed many of Gladstone’s works, and this quote seemed particularly appropriate:
Gladstone's gift for vivid storytelling, his deep empathy for his characters, his sly satire of current socioeconomic issues, and the rich, diverse world of his novels have become reliable pleasures, always enthralling and somehow consistently improving with every book.
Django Wexler writes oh-so-many great fantasy novels, novellas, and short stories (and also does great work recommending Craft Sequence on Reddit - I see you, and salute you, Django). He blurbed Last First Snow, and I think this point stands:
The Craft Sequence gets better with each volume. Max Gladstone gives us wonderfully relevant bits and pieces of the modern world, turned upside-down and inside-out and garnished with skeleton kings, serpent gods, and lawyer-magicians. It's glorious.
Martin Cahill is an Ignyte Award-nominated science fiction and fantasy writer, who provides some of the deepest insight into the Craft Sequence and Gladstone’s writing in his reviews. I wish I could write as eloquently about this series as he does. Here are a selection of quotes from a couple of them:
Meet the Craft Sequence. It’s messy and wonderful and magical and painful, and absolutely worth your while.
The Craft Sequence is so damn powerful, because Gladstone is using a secondary world to explore, interrogate, rip apart, and stitch back together modern anxieties and fears: the disillusionment with idols; the anger at the One Percent; the fear of losing our humanity to progress and technology; the willingness to compromise the present for a future that will (hopefully) be better.
Max Gladstone has spent most of his writing career planting seeds deep into the earth. Some of them burned, others sparked, some radiated divine light. But each was purposeful in the garden of story he has been building since the beginning. In Wicked Problems, it is the height of joy to see these seeds bearing their fruit, even as they continue to weave together.
On his march to whatever ending Gladstone has in mind, it is only a credit to his talent, intelligence, and empathy that along the way we not only get that rollicking adventure, Gods and Craft and serpents at the center of the earth and spiders amongst the stars, we also get one of his most beautiful, most complex human journeys in each and every character.
Amal El-Mohtar is an award-winning writer of fiction, poetry, and criticism, and also an Elayne Kevarian stan. Most Gladstone fans will be aware of Amal through her collaboration with Gladstone on NYT-bestselling This Is How You Lose The Time War. She LOVES the Craft Sequence:
If you value (as I do) character-driven plots, a cast of brilliantly developed and thoroughly different women, and friendships as driving narrative forces in your books, you absolutely must read it.
I love seeing the developing mosaic of Gladstone's world, the hard questions it asks at every turn, the uncertainty of its answers. These are books I long to talk about with people, so faceted and fierce are they, so dangerously aslant our own day-to-day grinds and so full of grace. Sharp, original, passionate — this series is everything I want urban fantasy to be.
Brent Lambert is a writer and founding member of FIYAH Literary Magazine, often talks about how much the Craft Sequence has influenced him as a writer. We also seem to use the same Avengers comparison for Wicked Problems, so we should become friends.
There are books/series that make me go "I won't feel complete as a writer until I can do something that makes someone feel like this" and CRAFT SEQUENCE is on that list.
The Craft Sequence is one of my biggest inspirations as a writer. I keep telling everyone this is my Infinity War and I absolutely mean it.
There are loads more reviews and praise out there for individual books, but these seemed MOST appropriate for ‘best series’. So. If you’re a WSFS member, you should go and nominate the Craft Sequence now. Nominations will close on Saturday, March 28, 2026 at 9:00am Pacific Time / 12:00pm Eastern Time / 4:00pm GMT.
References - formatted terribly, I apologise