Good News Everyone! We’re Hugo Finalists!


Escape Pod and Hugo logos on a planet and nebula background, text: 2026 Hugo Awards Best Semiprozine Finalist
We are honored to once again be Hugo finalists!
2025 was a stellar year for Escape Pod, celebrating both our 20th anniversary and our thousandth episode. It’s been an amazing journey, and it is the support of our listeners that brought us all this way.
In addition to them, we wouldn’t be where we are without the writers who crafted these stories in the first place, and without the narrators whose performances brought them to life. Our crew of readers and producers and hosts and everyone on the admin side also keep our starship sailing on, for which we are eternally, immensely grateful. These include:


Kevin Wabaunsee and Phoebe Barton, our assistant editors

Tina Connolly and Alasdair Stuart, our intrepid hosts
Adam Pracht and Summer Brooks, our audio producers

Marcus Tsong, Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko, Ewen Ma, Christine Amsden, Rick Danforth, Michael A. Pepin, EA Crawley, Abhijeet Sathe, Sarah Loch, Phoenix Alexander and Casey Lawrence, our associate editors

After twenty years, we still struggle with what “fun” and “hopeful” and “escapist” science fiction means from an editorial perspective. The terms are subjective, and a single work may not encompass all of them. Fun can be tempered by fatigue, hope by hardship, escape by painful experience. Even so, in recent years we believe it’s been more important than ever to give people a reason to feel good for at least an hour a week, and we’re still proud that our audience knows what they will get when they download Escape Pod.Thanks to everyone in our audience for joining us on this journey. We’re proud to help keep your escape pod fully stocked with stories.