Hey!
Every week I look forward to seeing which books different venues and people are talking about. There’s new stuff (because of course), but it’s fun to see which older (“older” in the sense that media releases run on plaid speed these days) books and media crop up.
There’s a slew of Locus reviews online this week, more Hugo/Worldcon commentary, reviews, and some art I will be getting prints of soon. Let’s get it!
This week I was going to beg everyone to read I’ll Laugh As You Bury Me: New Zealand, America and Cultural Hegemony by Sascha Stronach; it was very moving, but! It arrived around the same time as a few other things, and my pal Sandstone wrote a thread on Bluesky connecting the above essay with this Bluesky thread on criticism by Jenny and Roseanna’s long form analysis of Katabasis. At the end of the thread she wrote: “Everyone I know in the US is having a tough time, many of us are turning to fiction for comfort (not just cozy or romance but also the catharsis of dark, horror, dystopia) and fewer people than ever seem to want that comfort disrupted, but we need to think and talk about stories now more than ever.”
I don’t know whether it’s the English student or the historian in me, but I find critique so valuable. The last few years we’ve seen critique slowly dwindle as it’s devalued by most venues. It’s often framed as being unfairly mean to artists and sometimes even actively harmful. I worry that the suppression of artistic critique is part of the rise of authoritarianism. As someone in the U.S., I see a lot of truth in all these different points of view and wanted to highlight the connection that Sandstone saw when she read them together.
Let There Be Cringe
It’s a new Inner Spiral essay, so of course it’s on the mixtape. This is connected to the above conversation because fear of cruelty and being the Despised Main Character on social media is a big reason that critique, especially for the joy of learning from each other, has been so suppressed. I’ve engaged it and I try really, really hard not to anymore. One of the reasons Intergalactic Mixtape exists is because for so long I was afraid to take up space with my interests and opinions for fear of being wrong or doing things incorrectly and being judged harshly for it. I finally decided that I had wasted too much time being afraid and decided to embrace being a cringe autistic nerd. To be cringe is to be free. From the essay: “If we accept cruelty and conformity online, we accept them within ourselves.”
The Hugo Awards (2026)
Nominations for the Hugo Awards next year will open sometime in January/February. To nominate, you’ll need to have been a member of the Seattle Worldcon or get a membership to LAcon by January 31, 2026. For those only wanting to participate in the Hugo Awards, you’ll need the “WSFS Membership Only” option. However! Even if you don’t plan to participate in the awards (pay no mind to the single tear drifting down my cheek), I want everyone to participate in the collection of recs in the Hugo Spreadsheet of Doom. Reasons: (1) because no one can know every piece of cool SFF media released in a year in our current media environment, (2) more recs means more discovery, and (3) and mostly importantly: recs are cool.
Among Ghosts by Rachel Hartman (Molly Templeton @ Reactor)
Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz (Gary K. Wolfe @ Locus)
Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz (Bonnie McDaniel @ Red Headed Femme)
Cinder House by Freya Marske (Archita Mittra @ Locus)
Everybody Wants to Rule the World Except Me by Django Wexler (Rob Bedford @ SFFWorld)
Fate’s Bane by C.L. Clark (Joanne Anderton @ Locus)
Hemlock & Silver by T. Kingfisher (Bethan Hindmarch @ The Fantasy Hive)
The Incandescent by Emily Tesh (Nicholas Whyte @ From the Heart of Europe)
Katabasis by R. F. Kuang (Roseanna Pendlebury @ Nerds of a Feather)
Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders (Alex Kingsley @ Ancillary Review of Books)
Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders (Gary K. Wolfe @ Locus)
Lucky Day by Chuck Tingle (Carrie S. @ Smart Bitches Trashy Books)
Metallic Realms by Lincoln Michel (Paul Kincaid @ Strange Horizons)
Minds in Transit by Joan Slonczewski (Niall Harrison @ Locus)
Moonflow by Bitter Karella (Jonathan Thornton @ The Fantasy Hive)
Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman (Roseanna Pendlebury @ Nerds of a Feather)
Penric and the Bandit by Lois McMaster Bujold (Liz Bourke @ Locus)
Sinners (2025) (Camestros Felapton)
The Library at Hellebore by Cassandra Khaw (Elias @ Bar Cart Bookshelf)
The Magnus Archives (S2) (Para @ To Other Worlds)
The Summer War by Naomi Novik (Caitlin @ Realms of My Mind)
These Memories Do Not Belong to Us by Yiming Ma (Narrated Podcast)
These Memories Do Not Belong to Us by Yiming Ma (Tarvolon)
This Is My Body by Lindsay King-Miller (Jenny Hamilton @ Reactor)
Tideborn by Eliza Chan (Womble @ Runalong the Shelves)
The Two Lies of Faven Sythe by Megan E. O’Keefe (Liz Bourke @ Locus)
Wearing the Lion by John Wiswell (Jenny Hamilton @ Reading the End)
Wednesday Season 2, Part 1 (Ann Michelle Harris @ Nerds of a Feather)
The Hugo/Worldcon discussion has continued! Of interest to me: there are still no nominating statistics from Seattle as of writing this. If the 2016 Kansas City Worldcon team could put printed pieces of paper in our hands with all the long list data right after the ceremony ended, I don’t understand why we can’t have a public statement of intent/timeline from Seattle.
When People Giggle at Your Name, or the 2025 Hugo Awards Incident (Grigory Lukin)
On the Perennial Embarrassment of Worldcon (Miri Baker)
Pronouncing the names correctly at the Hugo ceremony (Nicholas Whyte)
The Odd Silence from Seattle on the Hugo Ceremony Problems (Camestros Felapton)
Dispatches from Seattle WorldCon! (Hugos, There!)
A Lot of Double-Sided Bra Tape (this is also Octothorpe’s very 142nd episode)
Seattle Worldcon (A Meal of Thorns)
Exploring Fantasy Books by George RR Martin and Brandson Sanderson (Bailey/greekchoir)
On stories, awards, and reading (Coode Street Podcast #684; they discuss the con at the beginning)
In non-Hugo Award news, the Otherwise Awards, which had a small hiatus a few years ago, released the first part of a recommendation list they’re doing to highlight books during the years where there was no award. Recs are open for the 2025 Otherwise Awards, too. Although it’s not an award per se, I suspect the results are similar, as former President Barack Obama shared his summer reading list, which included The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones. I’ve been hearing a lot about that title elsewhere, and it sounds great. Good luck getting it at any library in the country now, though!
Meanwhile, fans have continued to make cool things! The Rec Center dropped their weekly issue, as did The Full Lid. To The Full Lid folks and other enablers over the past few months: thanks so much, I’m now addicted to Tiny Bookshop. Kelsey over at The Fancy Hat Lady Reads did an episode reccing books people might like based on the Hugo Award finalists. Kristen from Fantasy Cafe partnered with the Ashland Public Library to do an SFF rec series, and the latest video is up (yes I did remind people Kristen is eligible for multiple Hugo fan awards).
Stitch & Bitch recorded their liveshow for August. This time, it wasn’t me who spoke something cursed into the universe. Mona Lisa Overpod dropped episode #30, discussing The Long Tomorrow by Dan O'Bannon and Moebius. Antimatter Pod shared episode #210 discussing Star Trek: Strange New Worlds S3E7. The more I learn about this show the more I’m like, “did I get off easy by stopping with The Next Generation?” Over on Mythcreants, Oren Ashkenazi writes in search of the answer to which book of The Final Architecture by Adrian Tchaikovsky is the best. Womble has a new edition of his SFF commentary rec list out. And Tarvolon reviewed the August 2025 issue of Clarkesworld.
The Orilium Magical Readathon has launched; I’m always super impressed with this project. The artist did so much incredible worldbuilding to make it immersive. Good luck to everyone participating. In “rediscovering cool things” news, the other day I realized Shousetsu Bang*Bang was still around. Issue #116 is out now. Imagine a long running original queer fiction zine, often tackling speculative topics, that’s free to read! I was thrilled that they were still kicking.
There were several great threads on Bluesky this week. Abigail Nussbaum shared a novella recommendations thread a few months ago that I missed but that got boosted onto my timeline. The lesson: repost neat things, even if it’s “old”. It’s new to someone! Meredith Rose did a Ghibli power-ranking, and I love these kinds of threads so much. Seeing the ways the different films hit people is fascinating. Now I’m pondering what mine would be even though I’ve seen even fewer Ghibli films.
Because we’re in Peak Q3 Book Season and Awards Wrap Up Season both, there’s a lot of book buzz. Add in hype for 2026 books and you’ve got the next few paragraphs full of things. The King Must Die by Kemi Ashing-Giwa got a positive review in Publishers Weekly (you can preorder in the US here). Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Booklist, and Reactor also liked All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu (US preorder link is here). Author copies for The First Thousand Trees by Premee Mohamed arrived. Apparently if you get the paperback you also get the ebook, which is very cool. Mohamed also did an AMA on Reddit.
John Chu’s upcoming 2026 novel, The Subtle Art of Folding Space (preorder), has a gorgeous cover by Weston Wei. Now there’s a nice animated version! Chloe N. Clark debuted the cover for her collection, Every Galaxy a Circle, which is giving big Jupiter energy. Fantasy Hive has a cover reveal for All We Have Left by Emily Paxman.
You can read an excerpt of The Door on the Sea by Caskey Russell on Reactor. There’s also an excerpt of The Art of Legend by Wesley Chu, which is the third book in a series I wasn’t aware existed! Via Transfer Orbit, Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time is getting a new special edition, for people who like spider art (couldn’t be me). Plus, Allen M. Steele’s Coyote series is getting rereleased, so I have yet more books to read for my space opera project!
Remember You Will Die by Eden Robins is on the 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction shortlist, and she introduced her book via video. I lost it at the glasses, and I was not alone. The Witch Roads by Kate Elliott now has an audiobook narrated by Ella Lynch. You can get a huge collection of Martha Wells books in this Humble Bundle package. T-Kingfisher was back on the SFF Addicts podcast for episode #169 to talk about Fairy Tale Reimaginings.
Interview wise, a few popped up this week: at Nerd Daily, Jackson Ford was interviewed about The Bone Raiders and Sara Raasch was interviewed about The Entanglement of Rival Wizards. The development team behind 1000xRESIST, sunset visitor, was interviewed over at Unwinnable. 1000xRESIST was a Hugo finalist this year. Susana M. Morris, author of Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler was on Skiffy and Fanty. Yiming Ma was interviewed over at Electric Literature about These Memories Do Not Belong to Us.
Art recs: The Botanists & GoldyLocs by gdbee. #Smaugust day 23 - tarot by Ello. Red. ❤️ by SimzArt. KPop Demon Hunters Trio by Yoshi Yoshitani. flora 🦩🩷☁️ by bunnie. Detritus Devil by Levi Hastings. He greets you at the gate 🐈⬛⛩️ and a hat thief 🦊🧡 by Adam. My Neighbor Demon-Tiger by Devin Elle Kurtz.
Does anyone else have the radioactive shrimp song stuck in their head? I was humming it at the library and another patron looked over at me in horrified recognition, so I know I’m not the only one walking around in meatspace with it on a loop in my brain.
That’s it for this week! Take care of yourselves out there. Avoid shrimps for now.