Hey!

This week, award season continues, plus everyone is beginning to emerge from their holiday cocoons. Reviews of 2026 books are ramping up and I’m excited to see what everyone says (so I know what I want to read).

A-Side

Hugo Award Nominations Are Open
If you were a voter in the Seattle Hugo Awards and had the con forward your membership to LA, or you bought a membership to LA before January 31, It Is Time. Notifications have been going out, so check your spam folders. The Hugo Spreadsheet of Doom awaits with many recommendations. Meanwhile, every year I am newly charmed by our voting software’s name, NomNom. This really should be more widely known. Meanwhile, don’t forget you can also vote for the Locus Awards, and write in important oversights! (Me, the last week: furiously messaging everyone I know who loved The Witch Roads to see if I can convince them to vote. Look, even Martha Wells agrees with me.)

Velocity Is the New Authority. Here’s Why
This essay captured one reason the modern-day Internet makes me feel so tired. I’ve talked about this before, referencing Jay Smooth’s perspective on being first, because being first is also about velocity. But part of the reason this newsletter exists is that the speed at which information I was taking in started to be actively over-stimulating. Eventually, I wanted to slow down. I wanted to think more about what I was reading and watching. I can feel people looking suspiciously at the length of my newsletters and the amount of content I share, but I really have slowed down. Now I think more deliberately about what I read, want to share, and when to do it. The speed at which Everything Happens So Much has been actively detrimental to creative communities, and I decided that although I am only one person, I can simply stop participating. This is why this newsletter will never have a “Brand New!” focus, and why sometimes links show up months after they’ve been published. It’s okay to slow down. Older art is still good art even if the speed of online culture tries to convince us it’s not.

Carol Doesn’t Understand Georgia O’Keeffe In ‘Pluribus’
Since finishing Pluribus, I’ve been slowly making my way through all the essays and critiques I’ve found. This one contains some big spoilers for one of the plot developments, so be careful if you’re not done with the first season yet. It critiques Carol’s actions through the lens of art history. Carol’s behavior toward the art and her natural world is contrasted against the artist’s intent and the context in which the art was created. It’s a really lovely essay.

Reviews/Discussions

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (Literaturely Lou)
Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs to Die by Greer Stothers (geraniums-red)
The Apple and The Pearl by Rym Kechacha (Womble @ Runalong the Shelves)
The Astral Library by Kate Quinn (Paul Weimer @ Nerds of a Feather)
Brigands & Breadknives by Travis Baldree (Cheryl Morgan @ Salon Futura)
Brigands & Breadknives by Travis Baldree (Anushree Nande @ Strange Horizons)
City of Others by Jared Poon (Only the Best Fantasy Novels)
Diaspora by Greg Egan (A Meal of Thorns Podcast)
Hemlock & Silver by by T. Kingfisher (Narrated Podcast)
The Isle in the Silver Sea by Tasha Suri (Alex Brown @ Reactor)
Masquerade by O. O. Sangoyomi (Kristen @ Fantasy Cafe)
On Sundays She Picked Flowers by Yah Yah Scholfield (Kat Marsh @ The Fantasy Hive)
Operation Bounce House by Matt Dinniman (Usman Zunnoor @ SFF Insiders)
Project Hanuman by Stewart Hotston (Alex Brown @ Reactor)
The Rainseekers by Matthew Kressel (TarVolon)
Spiderlight by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Andy Sawyer @ Strange Horizons)
These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart by Izzy Wasserstein (Alex Wallace @ Nerds of a Feather)
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (Fiction Fans Podcast)
To Ride a Rising Storm by Moniquill Blackgoose (Annemieke @ A Dance with Books)
The Village at the Edge of Noon by Darya Bobyleva, translated by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse (Niall Harrison @ Locus)
With the Heart of a Ghost by Lim Sunwoo, translated by Chi-Young Kim (Rachel Cordasco @ SF in Translation)

B-Side

Lexi shared her 2025 favorites video; I guessed what her favorite book was going to be and I was correct. At The Rec Center, Femslash February is a go! They have a full hopper, but as I say, there’s no such thing as too many recommendations. Bookmark their rec form and toss in recs for fics you love whenever you have them, especially for smaller ships and fandoms! Eddie Clark is not starting an award, but what if he did this project and it was successful and led to one? What then, Eddie?! Also, at Nerds of a Feather, he shared some nanoreviews for a few SFF titles: Matryoshka, Boy, With Accidental Dinosaur, and The Rainseekers.

Camestros Felapton put out a call to nominate some Fan Writers for the Hugos. I’m very invested in the fan categories and agree wholeheartedly. The list is very long, but it could be longer! I have almost a year of reading tons of eligible writers under my belt. Next year’s Hugo rec sheet is gonna be piping hot with talent. At SFF Book Reviews, The State of SFF for February is out. Wow! Signal dropped at Ancillary Review of Books for February. Transfer Orbit has a list of February new releases. The Coode Street Podcast had a wide-ranging discussion from reviewing to the politics of anthologies, plus books they’re looking forward to.

If you are independently wealthy, please give me the money to afford Folio Society editions of The Last Unicorn and Station Eleven. The Great Tolkien Adventure continues: Nick Hubble over at Prospective Cultures has their deep dive into hobbits and Abigail Nussbaum explores The Old Forest. Randomly, a post from Naomi Kritzer came across my timeline, where she shared her 2025 WisCon Guest of Honor speech. It’s pretty good.

There’s going to be a new Mummy movie. I hope it’s uhhhh less racist than its predecessors. As much as I love them as character pieces, I’m not sure this is a space we needed to revisit. We could revive quality romantic comedies and put Fraser in those. I’m excited for Disclosure Day, because I love a good alien thriller. However, I’m most ecstatic over the new trailer for the second season of One Piece. YES: Baroque Works! Robin! Chopper! LABOON. I am ready to ugly sob over a whale.

In short fiction, Womble reviewed the November/December issues of Pseudopod (are they issues? unsure what to call them). At Locus, Maria Haskins reviewed stories from FIYAH, Flash Fiction Online, and GigaNotoSaurus and A.C. Wise reviewed the Nov/Dec issue of Asimov’s. Sam J. Miller shared some favorite short fiction from 2025. Charles Payseur collected a list of queer short SFF from December 2025.

The week in SFF book excerpts was robust: Rabbit Test and Other Stories by Samantha Mills; Nobody’s Baby by Olivia Waite; Goblin Market by A.J. Hackwith; The Fox and the Devil by Kiersten White; and Pedro the Vast by Simón Lopez Trujillo.

Paul Semel has an interview with Justin C. Key, author of The Hospital At The End Of The World. Key also has a Big Idea column about his book at Whatever. On SFF Addicts #189, they talk with Matt Dinniman about his recent release, Operation Bounce House. In an example of how deep my back log for the newsletter goes, Kate Elliott did an interview three months ago that I finally got around to watching. This is me continuing to reject that only new art is good. Old art is also excellent. The Fiction Fans Podcast interviewed Stark Holborn about her new book, For the Road. At Nerd Daily, there’s a Q&A with Jarod K. Anderson, author of Strange Animals. In the January edition of Clarkesworld, Arley Sorg talks to Nicola Griffith and Alastair Reynolds.

For more SFF links, browse through Wombling Along from last week.

Art recs: Water experiencing itself by feef; Self-made by Aubo; Cat in red by KikiDoodle; Ghosts and hotpot by Melody; Caught up by Dominique Ramsey; The wildest dream of a Cormorant by Athanaca; Brother Mort & Sister Dot by ascalaphid; Feeling froggy by Nimasprout; got you some chocolates. don’t worry about the title by Azul; Bees by pikaole; gritty playing fiddle on the roof by feygele; Pole dancing Frogs and Pole Dancing Axolotls by Jaunty Art

Outro

If you like link round ups, I have revived Sidetracks, which is sort of where the seeds of Intergalactic Mixtape came from, over at Lady Business. It’s all non-genre stuff, plus sometimes other editors share cool things as well (sad violin music plays while I stare at them with hope glittering in my eyes).

That’s it for this week! Have a happy and safe weekend.