Hey!

Here are the books that have arrived at Intergalactic Mixtape HQ in the last little bit.

(We don’t talk about chronic book acquisition around here, partner.)

This week, there’s Hugo and Worldcon commentary galore, review links, some essays, and as usual, art recs!

A-Side

Hugo, Lodestar, and Astounding Awards Winners
I watched the awards with some of my group chats and my partner. I was surprised by some of the winners, especially in the fan categories, Best Related Work, and Best Novella. But the surprise of the night was Best Novel, where The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett won handily, according to the voting stats. He did a longer video talking about his win on IG. I was confident Someone You Could Build a Nest In was going to win, but I also remember what a surprise The Tainted Cup being on the finalist list was initially. I should have trusted my gut! There were 1,338 nominating ballots and 1,962 final ballots this year. My goal continues to be to get us to 2,000 nominators and 3,500 finalist voters on the regular by yapping incessantly about the awards. I’m young! It could happen!

We All Miss Mass Market Paperbacks
This essay about the reliable, space-saving mass market paperback was a great history and love letter to the medium. My recent experience with them is coming through my work in the Book Shop that my Friends of the Library chapter runs, where the mass market sections are very quickly wiped out when we do sales. But they always rotate back in! During our last bag sale, I watched people work on stacking mass markets, with their reliable shapes, into the bag first, and then piling everything else on top. Much like Templeton, I’m always on the lookout for older SFF in mass market that I can read for the first time. The vibes during the reading process? Immaculate.

The Long Way Is the Shortcut
This essay about the speed of life being a detriment to gaming had me nodding all the way through. This, from the beginning, struck hard: “The games haven’t changed, but we have; and after years of life conditioning us to expect instant gratification and constant stimulation, playing a slow-paced retro game can feel so... weird.” When my partner and I tried to replay Final Fantasy VI the grind of it all really showed me that our poor brains are no longer conditioned for these type of RPGs. Even modern RPGs that require you to build character skills over time via random encounters and boss battles feel fast paced now in comparison. We made it around halfway through the game before our ADHD distracted us for long enough that returning to the game felt strange. I do like that some of the changes cited in this essay to make games “faster” also operate as accessibility tools for more gamers. I definitely want to open all games up for more people to experience, even if creates a faster pace for others. And while this essay doesn’t tackle this (it’s a whole topic in itself) I sometimes wonder if the speed of gaming is also tied to the fact that so many make a career out of streaming these days. When you’re not just playing for yourself that changes things.

Reviews/Discussions

Alien: Earth Episodes 1 & 2 (Camestros Felapton)
All Systems Red by Martha Wells (Alex Brown @ Reactor)
Animals by Geoff Ryman (Niall Harrison @ Locus)
Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz (Womble @ Runalong the Shelves)
The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Mahvesh Murad @ Reactor)
Blood of the Old Kings by Sung-il Kim, translated by Anton Hur (Alex Wallace @ Nerds of a Feather)
The Bone Harp by Victoria Goddard (Para @ To Other Worlds)
Costumes for Time Travelers by A.R. Capetta (Alex Brown @ Locus)
A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett (@greekchoir/Bailey)
House of the Beast by Michelle Wong (Samantha @ ladybug.books)
The Incandescent by Emily Tesh (Womble @ Runalong the Shelves)
KPop Demon Hunters (Overinvested Pod)
The Magnus Archives (S1) (Para @ To Other Worlds)
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare by Roxy Chambers (Alasdair Stuart @ The Full Lid)
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (Emma Skies)
A Palace Near the Wind by AI Jiang (Paul Weimer @ Nerds of a Feather)
The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson (Paul Weimer @ Nerds of a Feather)
Sky on Fire by E.K. Johnston (Molly Templeton @ Reactor)
The Society of Unknowable Objects by Gareth Brown (Christine D. Baker @ Ancillary Review of Books)
A Song of Legends Lost by M.H. Ayinde (Tori)
The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez (Niko’s Book Reviews)
Voidwalker by S.A. MacLean (Realms of My Mind)
Voidwalker by S.A. MacLean (Samantha @ ladybug.books)
Where the Axe is Buried by Ray Nayler (Mark Yon @ SFF World)

B-Side

There’s a lot of Worldcon/Hugo Award discussion happening. I am, alas, not an All-Seeing Eye (yet!) so if you know of someone talking about their Worldcon experience or Hugo Award thoughts (especially off social media), hit up the link suggestion form.

The 2025 Hugo Awards Ceremony
Worldcon report: Thursday and Friday &
Worldcon Report: Saturday (KJ)
The 2025 Hugo Awards: You Win Some, You Lose Some (Abigail Nussbaum)
Hugo Debrief (Camestros Felapton)
My Thoughts On the Hugo Award Winners 2025 (Dina)
Some Comments on the 2025 Hugo Winners – with Bonus Tall Ship Photos (Cora Buhlert)

Now that Seattle Worldcon is over, it’s time to shift to LA Worldcon. They did a call for volunteers on Bluesky recently, looking for Guest Liaisons and Panel Brainstormers. I heard there were very few panels for reviewers or critics at Seattle, so maybe this would be a good opportunity. What they really need are some sensitivity guides, because the con chair has already had to apologize for racist marketing decisions. I’m glad they responded promptly and hope that means they’ll be receptive to WSFS member and public feedback going forward.

In other award news, the Aldiss Award shortlist is out. This is a new award to me. It focuses on world building. The Nommo Awards, an African SF prize, also released their shortlists; there are multiple categories. The Sidewise Awards for Alternate history has winners! The Neffy Awards announced their winners, too; this is an award of the National Fantasy Fan Federation that honors “achievements in speculative fiction in new media as well as traditional media”.

Over the weekend Hank Green mentioned Focus Friend, a new app that (like the title says) helps you focus. I downloaded it, promptly went “wait, why are scarves worth more than socks?” and then proceeded to earn socks by going and doing a task I had been putting off for three months so I could earn the socks to buy…a plant. If you interrupt your bean mid-session they drop their stitches! The horror! Green talked about the launch of the app and the financial decisions behind it, which I found interesting in this cursed time of in-game ads (see essay in A-Side). Anyway, my bean is named Whimsy.

The trailer for Good Boy dropped and immediately the question was, “Does the dog die?” Luckily, the internet answered immediately. Between Sinners, Weapons, and now Good Boy, I haven’t been this interested in horror since Event Horizon. Is there some kind of relationship between rising authoritarianism and interest in horror stories? Sliding over to the opposite side of the vibe spectrum, the Sword of the Sea game trailer looks beautiful and chill. Very obvious without having to read any copy that the people who worked on Journey were involved.

There’s a slew of new pods and newsletters! Last week, The Rec Center released issue #502. On the Narrated Podcast, they discussed which book worlds they’d like to vacation in. Antimatter Pod discussed Star Trek: Strange New Worlds‘ “The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail”. On the Mystery Spotcast, Ollie and Klaudia talk with Supernatural writer Meghan Fitzmartin and there’s an omegaverse surprise. Finally, Transfer Orbit has another list of SFF titles for August.

If you’re looking for short fiction recs and reviews, don’t miss Must Read Short Speculative Fiction: July 2025 by Alex Brown. Paula Guran reviews issues of Remains, The Dark, and The Deadlands. Womble covers several epsisodes of Pseudopod. Charles Payseur reviews GigaNotoSaurus, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Small Wonders from May 2025. A.C. Wise looks at the short fiction from the May/June Asimov’s issue.

Annalee Newitz was on KQED to talk about Automatic Noodle. Delilah S. Dawson was on The Functional Nerd podcast. T. Kingfisher/Ursula Vernon was on episode #168 of the SFF Addicts podcast. You can preorder Nobody’s Baby by Olivia Waite, if you enjoyed Murder by Memory. Isabel J. Kim’s upcoming novel, Sublimation, is getting some hype post-awards season and is up for preorder. You can also join me in preordering The Nameless Lands by Kate Elliott, sequel to The Witch Roads. It can be a nice November surprise for all of us (I will inevitably forget I preordered it and preorder another copy). There’s a few excerpts this week: Guardians of Dawn: Yuli by S. Jae-Jones, From The Things Gods Break by Abigail Owen, and Letters From an Imaginary Country by Theodora Goss.

And in case that wasn’t enough links, don’t miss Wombling Along from Runalong the Shelves!

Art recs: cover art for Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse by Reiko Murakami; Key of Calm by Mali; Black and Gold by Kristina Gehrmann; crooked crocs by Aled Thompson; Cute short hair by gdbee; Restless like the sea by Claire SUN; Yellow-eared bulbul by Athanaca; The Star by coyoteprince; Purple Pentapi by Devin Elle Kurtz; We are Huntr/x, voices strong by Bailie; kelp forests by laura; Gwi-Ma Shwi-Ma... This is fine by Mimi; There is always room for you in my arms by jun-hug; Second sea by attractov; Murderbot by renmoss.

Outro

This is my first issue post-100 subscribers! Welcome to all the new readers. I hope you find something cool to read/watch/admire each week.

The internet of my childhood, before social media companies divided us up, was a window to SFF and fandom culture. If Intergalactic Mixtape is anything, it’s my love letter to an internet where the exchange of human ideas about stories still blooms up, regardless of how hard corporations try to lock us inside their data slurping ecosystems with their genAI abominations.

That’s it for this week! Have a great weekend.