Intergalactic Mixtape #25
This week the big news was the announcement of the 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for fiction, which I’ve dedicated a secton of B-Side to! There’s also the regular reviews and a reasonable number of lists. :D
A-Side
The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of 2025
Barnes & Noble already has the best books of the year out. Capital cares little for the fact that the year isn’t over yet! This is the science fiction and fantasy list; it’s heavy on the fantasy. I know the publishing machine is done with 2025 books and is already on to 2026 titles that are getting publisher investment, but I can’t help but be that person on her soapbox begging people to not write off the books that will come out in November and December. One of my most anticipated, The Nameless Land by Kate Elliott, drops on November 4. I hope everyone still makes monthly favorite lists for October through December for SFF books they like (because I would love to link to them if you sent them to me). I have a lot of thoughts about the speed of culture (new books, upcoming books, anticipated books) and how it harms reading and discussion and deeper thinking about what ideas books are in conversation with; maybe one day they will coalesce into a full thesis.
The Hugo Awards (2026)
It’s getting closer to the time of year where I start nagging (in a friendly way) for people to remember the Hugo Spreadsheet of Doom. If you’re already thinking about your SFF favorites, this is a great place to list some of them. I’m especially interested in seeing the artists and fan categories get more love. Remember: don’t self-reject!
Reviews/Discussions
Acts of God by Kanan Gill, narrated by Sunil Malhotra (Narrated Podcast)
Blindsight by Peter Watts (Rachel @ The Shades of Orange)
Blood of the Old Kings by Sung-il Kim, translated by Anton Hur (Rachel Cordasco @ Strange Horizons)
Blood of the Old Kings by Sung-il Kim, translated by Anton Hur (Only The Best Fantasy Novels)
Brighter Than Scale, Swifter than Flame by Neon Yang (Maggie @ The Lesbrary)
The Cold House by A.G. Slatter (Womble @ Runalong the Shelves)
Deadhouse Gates by Steven Erikson (Dina @ SFF Book Reviews)
The Essential Patricia A. McKillip (Trish Matson @ Skiffy and Fanty)
Exordia by Seth Dickinson (Stewart Hotston)
Frankenstein (2025) (Emmet Asher-Perrin @ Reactor)
Flight & Anchor by Nicole Kornher-Stace (Randomly Yours, Alex)
The Last Soul Among Wolves by Melissa Caruso (Alex Brown @ Locus)
The Library at Hellebore by Cassandra Khaw (Jeremy Brett @ Ancillary Review of Books)
The Lies of The Ajungo by Moses Ose Utomi (Niko’s Book Reviews)
Lives of Bitter Rain by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Womble @ Runalong the Shelves)
Moonflow by Bitter Karella (Womble @ Runalong the Shelves)
The Nameless Land by Kate Elliott (Paul Weimer @ Nerds of a Feather)
Sinners (2025) (Binary System Podcast)
Someone You Can Build A Nest In by John Wiswell (Danika Ellis @ The Lesbrary)
The Stardust Thief by Chelsea Abdullah (The G @ Nerds of a Feather)
On the Calculation of Volume (I) by Solvej Balle (Stewart Hotston)
Tron: Ares (2025) (Arturo Serrano @ Nerds of a Feather)
What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher (Monica @ Growls & Grimm)
What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher (Bethan Hindmarch @ The Fantasy Hive)
The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes (Tobias Carroll @ Reactor)
B-Side
Over at Transfer Orbit, there’s one more list of October 2025 releases. At Reactor, Alex Brown has a rec list for books about evil houses. The Rec Center continues its Halloween month rec series with a collection of fanfic recs featuring werewolves.
There was an new issue of the Full Lid. The Mystery Spotcast recapped episodes 10 and 11 of Supernatural Season 6. Over at Fantasy Cafe, Kristen is hosting a giveaway for a finished copy of The Essential Patricia A. McKillip.
The 2024 Endeavour Award Winner, given to a Pacific Northwest author, is Relics of Ruin by Erin M. Evans. Gautam Bhatia, author of The Sentence, wrote about winning an Ignyte Award and the book being acquired by Saga Press. Illumicrate is doing a special edition of The Murderbot Diaries. On Bluesky, I got to mark myself safe from this temptation, because I don’t actually like that there’s not a cohesive color palette. I continue to be irked that Fugitive Telemetry and System Collapse get packaged together. I’m too autistic for this pairing.
Weapons will be on HBO Max for Halloween, if, like me, you were too much a wimp about horror and/or COVID exposure to see it in theaters. It looks like the Horizon Zero Dawn movie might still be a thing, which I’m torn over because so much of the joy of the series is the discovery of the world over time while exploring. I fear we’re in for a World War Z adaptation scenario. In a world where, “Somehow, Palpatine returned” is a real thing that happened, it simply wasn’t possible to do a Kylo Ren film because the moneybag gatekeepers decided he was too dead. Did they watch how Palpatine died?! The reactions to this across my personal timelines has been evenly divided between “abject relief” and “crushing disappointment”, and no in-between. The other big (and heartwarming) buzz was that Ryan Coogler will be rebooting The X-Files, partially because it's a media property he shares with his mom.
Jennifer Estep is over at Whatever for a Big Idea column about her new book, Only Rogue Actions. Marie Lu has a Big Idea column for her new book, Red City. L.R. Lam had a guest post over at Nerd Daily: 7 Things I Learned Re-Writing My Debut Series Twelve Years Later. Martha Wells was interviewed by the San Antonio Current. Lorraine Wilson, author of The Salt Oracle, was interviewed on FanFiAddict. Tim Melody Pratt was interviewed by Kat Kourbeti for Strange Horizons @ 25. Kemi Ashing-Giwa, author of The King Must Die, was on the Coode Street Podcast to talk about the book and her career so far.
Over at Nerd Daily, there are interviews with Axie Oh, author of The Demon and the Light; Eden Royce, author of Psychopomp & Circumstance; Lyndsay Ely, author of The Lost Reliquary; Gabriela Romero Lacruz, author of The River and the Star; and Wen-yi Lee, author of When They Burned The Butterfly.
As usual, for more SFF links, check out Wombling Along for last week’s collection.
2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize
One of the most interesting award shortlists this year was the the Le Guin Prize. The finalists were:
Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera
Archangels of Funk by Andrea Hairston
Blackheart Man by Nalo Hopkinson
The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy
The West Passage by Jared Pechaček
Remember You Will Die by Eden Robins
The City in Glass by Nghi Vo
North Continent Ribbon by Ursula Whitcher
The winner for 2025 was Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera. His acceptance speech is available here on Youtube, and it’s worth a watch. He also did a reading from the book a few weeks ago.
I dived into my newsletter archives and asked over on Bluesky so I could share a list of what reviewers said about Rakesfall over the last year.
"As a story about stories, it understands how crucial a part the reader plays in that dynamic - the need to trust them, to let them find their own way, their own understanding of what is provided, and feel no need to browbeat them into comprehension, to require them to take a single canonical point. The themes I found in it - and enjoyed, well-explored as they were - were around power and oppression, colonialism, autonomy, destiny and inevitability, the role of the player in the story, the power of choices."
— Roseanna Pendlebury @ Nerds of a Feather
"For my part, I found it best to stop fighting. I stopped trying to map out a timeline in my head, or catalogue the actions of each character, and just submerged into the book. Like a dream, I was carried along in a rush of emotion and imagery that told me what I needed to know."
— Misha Grifka Wander @ Ancillary Review of Books
"Rakesfall is a story about continuity, oppression, freedom, curses, justice, and the longest, deepest view of time. It is about ancestors and kin, lovers and enemies, colonization and the eventual diaspora that will include all of humanity if this planet becomes unlivable."
— Molly Templeton @ Reactor
Other reviews of Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera:
Helena Ramsaroop @ Strange Horizons
Elias @ Bar Cart Bookshelf
Stewart Hotston
Womble @ Runalong the Shelves
Only The Best Fantasy Novels
John Folk-Williams @ SciFi Mind
Madeline Schultz @ Chicago Review of Books
Ian Mond @ Locus
Shay @ Poetry.Shaman
Sia @ Every Book a Doorway
Rich Horton @ Strange at Ecbatan
If you have a review of Rakesfall, or any of the others nominated for this year’s prize, feel free to send it along.
Outro
That’s all for this week! Don’t forget you can submit book recs any time. :) Take care and have a great weekend. — Renay