Tomorrow at noon Pacific time, voting closes for the Hugo Awards. 2025 saw a lot of great science fiction and fantasy published, and this is your last chance to vote for the best work in the field, to have your voice heard, and to download a sweet Hugo Packet full of books and stories and graphic novels and games. I think most of the Series nominees added their entire series to the packet? That right there is a truly wild amount of fiction. And poetry! This year, for the first time, we have a poetry Hugo!

It’s also your last chance to vote for the Craft books for Best Series… possibly ever, since if I’m reading the present rules correctly I would need to publish two more books in the series before it would be eligible again, and the plan—toward the fulfillment of which I am directing a vicious killing ki—is to publish one final, capstone volume, even if that volume strains the physical constraints of glue a bit. Yes, the current draft is getting a bit long, but we’re nowhere near even one volume of To Green Angel Tower yet. There are just a lot of threads, is all. And I always write long in the first draft.

Is what I’m telling myself.

But more on that later.

If you have a membership and you’d like to vote, it’s a simple process.

Mostly simple. On the LACon website, the link to the “Membership Portal” through which you must pass to vote on the Hugo Awards lies in a submenu of the “Attendees” menu at the top of the page, and in a section called “Important Links” very conveniently at the very bottom. But I can link it for you here, like so: Membership Portal. Once you’re there it’s a quick matter of, if you’re at all like me, trying three different saved passwords before giving up and resetting the whole thing, and: you’re in! Just click on “Hugo Awards,” then on the green button on the next page, and proceed with your ranking. (And if you haven’t yet—you can download the voter packet on the page with the green button for voting.)

If you do not have a membership and would like to get one in order to vote, you can do so here. Any “full weekend” membership confers voting privileges. If you’re planning to attend the convention, that’s great! If not, a Virtual membership ($80) will let you attend online or live-streamed events, and a “WSFS-only” membership ($50) will allow you to vote.

Happy reading, and happy voting! I appreciate your consideration. And, I mean, I know who I’m voting for.

I had a wonderful time at the GenCon Writer’s Symposium last weekend. I don’t think there was a solid hour at the convention in which I wasn’t either talking intently with someone (old friends, new friends, complete strangers, fans, comrades) or immersed in the sensory wash of humans playing (selling, repping, talking enthusiastically about) games. It was such glowing energy, the whole time.

Wandering around the convention grounds Wednesday night after arrival, in a post-airplane daze I saw table after table of folks at play: cards were placed, figurines moved, dice rolled. I was reminded of a Knights of the Dinner Table strip where The Gang goes to GenCon: our heroes (who spend every strip sitting around a table playing a game very much like Dungeons & Dragons) talk about how excited they are to go to GenCon! And then the punchline strip: a panel with the dateline GENCON, INDIANAPOLIS, in which the gang is… of course, still sitting around a table playing D&D. There’s a sense of sad trombone about the strip but not so in real life. Wherever you go, there you are, after all: and in the case of GenCon, there you are, surrounded by thousands of other people who are discovering that they, too, are here.

There is of course the sheer overwhelm of the commercial activity of gaming (not to mention the speculative aspect—it’s tough out there being a guy who’d like to bring home a few Pokemon packs for his kid without dropping a utility bill in the process, and not one of the nice little utility bills either), and the raw sensory overload. (Did y’all know that there are SO MANY GAMES?) But for the most part, folks seemed happy to be playing, learning, and exploring. I certainly was.

Even when the tornado came through! I learned, for instance, that Indiana folks are remarkably chill about tornadoes.

“The Assumption of Maria” has been out for a while now and folks have been very positive about it. I wanted to share a bit more about the story’s genesis.

“Assumption” grew out of a project hosted by the extremely-science-fictionally named DIAD Institute at Dartmouth, the final product of which is the forthcoming MIT Press anthology, Android in the Archives, edited by Sharang Biswas and Liz Gorinsky. “Assumption” was published by Lightspeed as part of this project.

The project matched writers up with academics and exposed us to a bunch of research, both by our own partner and by the partners of others. I spent most of my time with Dr. Devin Singh, whose work on debt and religion (particularly but not exclusively Christianity) will likely interest you if you like my writing. Dr. Singh’s book Divine Currency is a great place to start with his thinking, but the heart of his presentation focused on the conflation of moral and theological and economic senses of debt. What is happening when we conflate debt-as-obligation-to-pay with debt in the sense of “what do we owe to one another”? Are these concepts intrinsically linked or can they be teased apart? If one cannot serve both God and Mammon, why do we use much of the same language to describe our relationship to each? (It’s been a while but if I recall correctly you can translate the Lord’s Prayer, “forgive us our debtors as we forgive those who have debts with us.”) As a longtime fan of Michael Taussig’s The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America and of Graeber’s Debt: the First 5000 Years, I was hooked; at first, in fact, the hard part was finding a new direction to go with this in my own work, since I’ve spent so much time working on related angles. I don’t know if my absurdist hyper-conflation of debt and sin in “Assumption” is quite what Devin had in mind, but I had a lot of fun with it, and I’m grateful to Devin and Liz and Sharang and to Paula Olsen and Sol Diamond at the DIAD institute and to all the other authors on the project (I’d name names but I don’t think I’m allowed to spoil it yet?)—you made this a really special process.

Also, Erik Grove interviewed me about this story for Lightspeed! You can check out the Author Spotlight here.

And that’s what I’ve got for this week, friends. I hope you’re staying strong and sharp and wise and brave, and finding good books and good company. Happy reading, hang in there, and work for the liberation of all sentient beings.