After fans fought back at the Hugos, seeing off the Sad Puppies with a host of votes for “no award”, we can look forward to SF becoming a little less old, white and male in 2016. The growing range of authors breaking through to mainstream recognition, often after years of hard work in small presses, means the work is there to chose from. Books like Daniel José Older’s Half Resurrection Blues, NK Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy and Ken Liu’s The Grace of Kings have been working to redefine the archetypes of fantasy and sci-fi for a broader audience. With that groundwork in place, you can expect to see some of these writers go on to mainstream recognition and bestseller success in 2016.

The sad passing of Terry Pratchett this year has left British sci-fi a much emptier place. Genevieve Cogman’s The Masked City, sequel to 2014’s The Invisible Library, is a book very much in the humorous and satirical tradition of Discworld, although its fantasy setting is more urban than epic. Europe in Autumn, the opening volume of the spectacular Fractured Europe Sequence by Dave Hutchinson, narrowly missed out on both the BSFA and Clarke awards in 2015. Europe at Midnight deserves to take at least one of those awards, and win the author a much wider readership.

The fantasy genre has been dominated by “grimdark” in recent years, which means bigger swords, more fighting, bloodier blood, more fighting, axes, more fighting and, one suspects, a not-all-that-covert commercial imperative to win adolescent male readers. It’s well beyond time for the evil eye of genre publishing to swing back towards a truly epic and more emotionally nuanced kind of fantasy, and if Ilana C Myer’s Last Song Before Night is any indication, the shift is under way. Myer’s debut is exactly the kind of fantasy to lure back readers, like myself, who want great writing and great storytelling, not an endless parade of fight sequences.

Unless you’ve been under a plutoid in the Kuiper belt, you probably noticed the arrival of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. An undoubted highlight of the three-ring circus leading up to it was the release of Star Wars: Aftermath by Chuck Wendig, whose profanity-laden blogging style has helped win him a small army of equally sweary fans. Franchise novels exist in an odd shadow world, regularly outselling original novels, while rarely being noticed otherwise. Wendig’s book enraged a few fans with its present-tense prose and gay characters, in the process showing that a franchise book could be a lively part of the mass-media storytelling experience. With at least two more Star Wars novels coming from Wendig, 2016 may be the year that franchise novels gain a little more respect, and maybe an award or two.