The rockets have landed. Last night at LAcon V in Anaheim, the 2026 Hugo Awards were handed out at a live ceremony, and the sci-fi/fantasy community has (once again) argued about the results on the internet for approximately twelve consecutive hours. Tradition is beautiful. The full winners list is up on the LAcon V site, so go see who took home the rocket.

The base this year was designed by Scott Lefton, which matters more than people realize: the iconic rocket stays constant, but the base is redesigned every single year to reflect the personality of the hosting convention. Southern California theming on a Hugo trophy. The Doctor approves. The Lodestar Award (that is the Young Adult fiction prize, for those of you not keeping score at home) got its own custom design courtesy of H Emiko Ogasawara. Good job, high-5. And yes, Best Poem is a category again, running for the second year in a row on a trial basis. Poetry at Worldcon. Carlin would have had thoughts.

Look, the Hugos are not a Punk award ceremony. Nobody walked the stage in a top hat and a clockwork monocle (probably). But the community that hands out these rockets is the same community that built every genre we celebrate here, including the Punk genres that keep this blog’s lights on. That makes it worth 30 seconds of your attention. Now go read the winners list and fight with strangers about it. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal.

Via: LAcon V (lacon.org)

A new steampunk TTRPG just landed on Kickstarter, and The Doctor is paying attention. Brass & Embers, from Questborne Studios out of Orlando, runs on a D6 system and drops you into a world where the whole civilization is about to tear itself apart over a mineral called machnite. The industrialists want to burn it for profit, the faithful want to keep it sacred, and the Queen is sitting in the back doing her best “entertaining fad” impression while quietly expanding her empire on everyone else’s dime. Sound familiar? Good. That means the setting has teeth.

The system is designed to be easy to pick up and can run short campaigns or long-haul ones, which is the right call: nobody wants a steampunk RPG that requires a graduate seminar just to roll initiative. Pledges start at US$20 for a digital sourcebook, $55 for hardcover (early-bird tiers, standard is $10 more). They’re after $42,000 by September 16th and were sitting at about 10 percent of goal as of last week, so if this sounds like your kind of industrial-age theological throwdown, go give it a shove. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a fully funded Kickstarter is a decent start.

Via: The Steampunk Explorer

Science Saru (the studio that gave us Dandadan) just went and made the Ghost in the Shell adaptation the manga has deserved for thirty-plus years. Not a remake of the 1995 Oshii film. Not a sequel. An actual manga adaptation, beat for beat, with Motoko Kusanagi doing what Motoko Kusanagi does: being the most lethally competent cyborg in the room while Section 9 slowly assembles around her. Eight episodes in on Prime Video, episode 9 lands September 1. The Doctor has opinions about timeliness, and “fashionably late” is one of them, so consider this your warning shot.

Is it CyberPunk? Obviously. Does the Omega7Red Formulae apply? The Formulae was built for this. A full-conversion cyborg questioning the nature of consciousness inside a near-future surveillance state is basically the Formulae’s operating manual in anime form. If you have a Prime subscription and you have not started this yet, I don’t know what you’re doing with your life, but it’s wrong. High-5 to Science Saru. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, and Section 9 is about to prove it.

It’s here. Tomorrow. Weekend at the Asylum 16 descends on Lincoln, UK August 28-31, and if you’re not already on a transatlantic flight with your brass goggles fogged from the sheer anticipation, I genuinely cannot help you. The Ministry of Steampunk has stacked the evening entertainment like a proper mad scientist stacks capacitors: Mr. B The Gentleman Rhymer, Victor and the Bully, Alice Strange, Madam Misfit, and Tom B. Wild Esq. are all on the bill. That is not a lineup. That is a declaration of intent.

Lincoln’s Drill Hall and the surrounding Victorian streets turn into the most gloriously unhinged retro-futurist party on the planet for four days every August, and this is edition sixteen. Sixteen. The Doctor has been watching this one grow from a curious experiment into an institution, and institutions that celebrate corsets, copper fittings, and chap-hop deserve every chandelier they’ve got. Go. If you can’t go, follow along on social media and feel appropriately miserable about your life choices.

Nothing can beat old age and betrayal. But a weekend in Lincoln might come close. Grab your tickets and your top hat.

A free outdoor steampunk festival in a historic Ontario town near Detroit, running September 18 through 20: gears, top hats, axe throwing, teapot racing, a wizard academy, a steampunk opera, and a comedian who bills himself as “40 Minutes of Danger and Dad Jokes.” The Doctor has read that sentence three times and it keeps getting better. They even laid on free bus service so you have zero excuses, including the classic “I can’t get there” excuse that you’ve been rehearsing since 2019.

Amherstburg is one of those towns where the Victorian architecture does half the work for you, which is exactly how the Omega7Red Formulae likes it: apply it to a place that already looks the part and you get something genuinely Uncommon. Cosplay in your finest steampunk or wizardry kit, challenge an international chess master, watch a live mural go up, and cap the night with fireworks. Most of it is free. FREE. The only thing standing between you and a weekend of this is your own lack of ambition, and frankly that’s a you problem.

Mark September 18-20 on whatever brass-fitted calendar you keep in your study. Full details at the official festival page. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal.

Bonsart Bokel (the Netherlands, creator of The Association of Ishtar series, host of the Radio Retrofuture podcast, and apparently incapable of sitting still) has a steampunk TTRPG on Kickstarter called NIGHTWATCH, and it is exactly as unhinged as it needs to be. The premise: rifts tear open portals to other worlds, some full of alien lifeforms, some populated by suspiciously advanced human civilizations, all of them begging to be explored by your faction of Operators who are absolutely NOT getting paid enough for this. Cosmic mystery. Pulp adventure. Steampunk everything. The Doctor approves.

The system is built around fast setup and high-action flow (board game mechanics were raided for inspiration, which is either genius or heresy, and I’ve decided it’s genius). Reviewers describe it as one of the easiest TTRPGs to pick up while still delivering deep world-building, and the art is handled by award-winning illustrators including Yohan Alexander. Play in Victorian London’s darkest alleys, or kick the rift open wider and end up in the Old West. The multiverse is your problem now. Grab the free prototype PDF on their site and see if you survive long enough to back the full thing.

Via: Kickstarter / NIGHTWATCH

Hand-built sculptural vehicles versus flying monkeys, killer robots, and zombies. On a closed course. Judged by how well the contraption handles the chaos. This is the Obtainium Cup Contraptor’s Rally, produced by Obtainium Works out of Vallejo, California, and the 10th Annual edition just went down on July 28 at Mare Island Art Studios. Ten years of this glorious nonsense. The Doctor approves wholeheartedly.

If you need a scorecard: participants build people-powered (and occasionally motorized) sculptural vehicles out of found objects, hence "obtainium," which is the most SteamPunk word that has ever existed. They then pilot those contraptions around an obstacle course while being assailed by stuffed flying monkeys, confronted by mad robots, and generally menaced by the entire cast of a fever dream. Trophies are awarded for creativity, tenacity, and participation. There is no trophy for dignity, because dignity didn’t show up. Good.

Ten years in, the Obtainium Cup is proof that the maker spirit is alive, greasy, and completely off its rails, in the best possible way. High-5 to every contraption that survived. And a moment of respect for every one that didn’t. Via: The Steampunk Explorer

A giant Clock Tower plunges the world of Tearfeld into eternal night. A kid with a clock-hand sword and a mechanical cuckoo bird has to fix it. Yes, this is a ClockPunk video game, and yes, The Doctor approves of its entire premise. Duskfade, from Spanish indie studio Weird Beluga and published by Fireshine Games, hit PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2 on August 13th at $29.99. The aesthetic is the real payload here: rusted machinery, ticking motifs, grandfather-clock grappling hooks, and surreal architecture that feels like a fever dream someone had inside a pocketwatch. It already swept three awards at BCN Game Fest (including Best Game and Best Sound), so the bones are undeniably there.

Now, the honest part: the pro reviews are… more complicated. Steam players are sitting at 89% Very Positive, which is respectable. The critics, on the other hand, keep landing on the same note: gorgeous world, competent-to-repetitive combat, levels that don’t fully live up to the art. That tracks. Sometimes a team nails the vibe and the mechanics are just a vehicle to get you through more of it. For ClockPunk fans, Duskfade is essentially a guided tour of a world you want to live in, even if the tour guide occasionally runs you in circles. I’m giving it ΩΩΩ: the aesthetic earns its keep, the execution needs another pass, and I’d still rather be here than in a hundred brown-corridor shooters. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a clockwork cuckoo bird companion comes close.

The people behind the Great Dickens Christmas Fair spent two months building 46 period structures in a pair of Cow Palace warehouses, loaded the whole town onto eight semi-trucks, drove it to Pier 35, and reassembled a functioning Gold Rush-era San Francisco on the waterfront. Over 100 costumed performers (miners, sailors, revue dancers, a juggler, a magician), a docked brigantine you can actually board, saloons, a general store, the Alta California newspaper office, and a pan-for-gold station. Today and tomorrow only. If that logistical audacity doesn’t read as Punk, I don’t know what does.

The San Francisco Historium Spotlight runs August 22-23, 2026 at Pier 35 (10am-6pm). Tickets are $40 adults, $20 kids 5-12, free under 5. Red Barn Productions has been doing this flavor of immersive living-history theater since 1961, and it shows: this isn’t a theme park, it’s an argument that the past was more interesting than the present, made entirely out of hand-painted set pieces and sheer theatrical nerve. The Doctor approves. High-5 to the scenic carpenters who built a ship facade out of lumber, because during the actual Gold Rush, abandoned ships were cannibalized to build San Francisco anyway. History, recursing into itself. Beautiful.

Via: SFist

Five kingdoms. Airborne dreadnoughts. Steam-powered weapons. Eldritch leviathans. A cosmology built from North, South, East, West, and Central African mythology. That is the world of Zairoo, and Molombo Thillia Thillot III has been building it in his head since he was 13. The Formulae approves of a man who commits to the bit for that long.

The pitch is exactly as good as it sounds: an alternate 17th-18th century where African myths come alive, science and ancient mysticism share a workbench, and the stat system runs on attributes called Grit, Vision, Soul, Vibe, and Flow. (Harmony and Discord track how close your heart is to full chaos. We’ve all been there.) The Kickstarter blew past $100,000, a fully playable Alpha PDF is already out, and the trailer crossed 80,000 views before Critical Role took notice. Not bad for a world that started as a 13-year-old’s notebook.

If you’ve ever felt like fantasy worldbuilding forgot that most of the planet exists, here is your corrective. Zairoo is exactly what the Omega7Red Formulae does when it gets applied to an entire mythological tradition: something you did not know you needed, now rendered in brass and smoke and ancient fire. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a Pan-African steampunk TTRPG with eldritch leviathans comes close. Via: GlobeNewswire