Here’s my third in a series of posts reviewing the 2026 Nebula Awards short-listed works in the Best Novel category. To see the complete list, go HERE. I’m on a mission to read and review all seven of these novels before the Science Fiction And Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) announces the winner at the Nebula awards ceremony on June 6, 2026. It will take place at the SFWA 61st annual conference, held this year in Chicago. I’m reading the novels alphabetically by author. If I have time, I’ll read a few others nominated in other categories.
The short-listed novels for the 2026 Nebula Awards:
When We Were Real, by Daryl Gregory (Saga)–see my review HERE
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, by Stephen Graham Jones (Saga; Titan UK)—see my review HERE
Katabasis, by R.F. Kuang (Harper Voyager US; Harper Voyager UK)–reviewed in this post
Death of the Author, by Nnedi Okorafor (Morrow; Gollancz)
The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh (Tor; Orbit UK)
Sour Cherry, by Natalia Theodoridou (Tin House; Wildfire)
Wearing the Lion, by John Wiswell (DAW; Arcadia)
Katabasis, by R. F. Kuang (Harper Voyager US; Harper Voyager UK)
Not one, but two novels of dark academia have made the Nebula short-list this year, and here is one of them. Go HERE for a good discussion of the dark academia sub-genre, and as a bonus for you YA readers, you’ll find capsule reviews of 21 YA novels of dark academia.
As you begin to read Kuang’s Katabasis, it is helpful to know that “katabasis” is the Greek term for travel to the underworld. Think of Dante’s The Inferno (especially that), the visits to the underworld in Virgil’s Aeneid and Homer’s Odyssey, the perilous journey the Sumerian deity Inanna makes to the underworld domain of her sister deity Erishkigal. Or think of contemporary novels like George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo (literary) or the Old Kingdom fantasy novels of Garth Nix (genre). Another work of speculative fiction striving for something similar is Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi. But Katabasis is not just a book about a trip to Hell. It’s about a trip to Hell to retrieve someone and bring him back. Think the journey of Orpheus to retrieve his dead love Eurydice–except in this case, the hero’s journey (heroine’s journey, at least at first) is motivated by guilt rather than love.
Kuang’s novel takes us on that journey, meanwhile mining the same “dark academia” vein of her 2022 Nebula winner, Babel. At the same time, Katabasis is a sly, funny send-up of academia at its very worst and most shameful. Sometimes, in these reviews, I have to admit I’m probably not the intended audience for a book. In this case, I’m too much invested in the world and atmosphere of this book! So, reader, beware. But if you too have ever spent a good part of your life in academia, you’ll recognize the pettiness, the toxicity, the euphoria, and the sheer driven-ness that removes all sane perspective from the hapless person embedded and struggling in its toils: outsize drama in a tiny setting (“Get a Life” syndrome, we academics call it), camaraderie similar to war buddies sharing fox holes, black-hearted back-stabbery. Did I mention hideous misogyny? overweening pretension? And if the academic environment is alien to you, the intricate little world exposed and eviscerated here is sure to fascinate you with its sheer strangeness.
I loved this book–winced through a lot of it, laughed through a lot of it. It is set in that rarefied Oxbridge atmosphere populated by academic snobs who look down on every other academic institution. Oxford looks down on Cambridge (an academic sport of long, long standing), both look down on the feckless American institutions, and those scramble for the remaining scraps of prestige.
I chortled at the passage describing Dartmouth’s petulant insistence on its status as an Ivy League institution (inside the Ivy League, this insistence raises amused eyebrows from the “real” or “better” or just “older” Ivies; outside it, nobody cares.) (NOBODY CARES!!!). I can laugh without being mean-spirited, because as a Penn graduate, I am in the same position.
I wept through the part where a professor takes advantage of his status to traumatize his students (meanwhile, outside academia, nobody cares. . .), channeling long-dead traumas of my own.
But Kuang’s academia is MAGIC academia. The premise of the book is that magic is a respected and long-standing part of the academic curriculum and plays as big a part in the world as physics or literary studies or philosophy. When a striving young graduate student inadvertently kills her professor of Magic with an ill-considered spell, she desperately seeks to bring him back by traveling to Hell to retrieve his soul.
All the rival maps of Hell–rival ways of seeing and imagining Hell–were fascinating. There were many, many arcane jokes. The name of a boat on the River Lethe, for example, is the Neuwarth. Some of these I got, some of them I had to look up (o the shame!), some went straight over my head. People who know more about logic and math (sorry, “maths”) than I do will surely have an easier time. But you don’t have to get every joke to enjoy this book.
The characters are really fun. The world-building is great. Sometimes, especially as the novel wends on and on and ON into the depths of Hell, the descriptions begin to get a bit labored and over-explained, but I was gripped with a pleasant tension that drove me rapidly to the end. Is a certain kind of academic experience too much like Hell? You bet. Do we fear for the characters, whom we have come to love, flaws and all? Absolutely.
Even with such a recent Nebula win, Kuang really deserves another one for this fascinating novel. If she gets the win, I’ll be the first in her cheering section. That said–which of the books in this list doesn’t deserve a Nebula? So I am torn.
Leave a Reply