Hey!

It was a quiet week on my feeds, but I was also not on them as much because I downloaded PowerWash Simulator 2 (you can PET THE CATS) and reread Winter’s Orbit while playing, as a winter treat to myself.

A-Side

The Case for Blogging in the Ruins
Intergalactic Mixtape is slowly becoming a soapbox from which I argue that slowing down and being deliberate about reading/writing is a way for the free exchange of ideas online to survive, and yes, even thrive! This essay hits all the points I would. I felt the “start a blog!” call to action deeply when I saw that Substack was partnering with Polymarket (double gross). Newsletters are also good, but not newsletters on platforms who are like, “helping Nazis make money is fine and contributing to gambling addiction is fine, actually.” I miss the robust writing communities that blogs created. It was easier to trace back conversations and a great place to learn: how to listen, analyze, and most importantly, how to be wrong without the entire Internet falling on your head. Not that having a blog would prevent that 100%, since out of context screenshot dunking is a thing. But people farming for outrage clout would have to read the blog post first and would they?

Checking the Perimeter
This very long, personal essay about asexuality in The Murderbot Diaries is fascinating. I thought about it for a long time, because I took the exact opposite reading from Network Effect that the author did, because Murderbot is a terribly unreliable narrator: it often misunderstands human intentions and humor. The world it inhabits is a complicated overlapping Venn diagram of people from different planets and systems with their own cultural understandings about relationships depending on their perspectives. We see one example of those play out in System Collapse from a actively grossed out distance. I read Amena’s behavior toward Murderbot and ART as a direct contrast to the way everyone else (except Thiago, but seriously, he’s a weirdo) trusts Murderbot to sort its own relationships, try on new labels, define its own lived experience, and most importantly, to change its own mind without judgment. This essay is great if you a) want to learn cool new gender words and b) want a deep dive take on ways different aroace people approach media ostensibly representing us.

Reviews/Discussions

Agnes Aubert's Mystical Cat Shelter by Heather Fawcett (Tammy @ Books, Bones, & Buffy)
Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter by Heather Fawcett (Becky’s Book Blog)
Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter by Heather Fawcett (Beth & Nils @ The Fantasy Hive)
Agnes Aubert's Mystical Cat Shelter by Heather Fawcett (Mark Yon @ SFF World)
All That Is In The Earth By Andrew Knighton (Womble @ Runalong the Shelves)
All That Is In The Earth By Andrew Knighton (Jamedi @ JamReads)
All That Is In The Earth By Andrew Knighton (Stewart Hotston @ Nerds of a Feather)
City of Others by Jared Poon (Elias @ Bar Cart Bookshelf)
The Daughter Who Remains by Nnedi Okorafor (Narrated Podcast)
The Forest on the Edge of Time by Jasmin Kirkbride (Jonathan Thornton @ The Fantasy Hive)
Into the Sun by C.F. Ramuz, translated by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan (Dawn Macdonald @ Strange Horizons)
Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders (Paul Weimer @ Nerds of a Feather)
Linghun by Ai Jiang (Rowena @ Beneath a Thousand Skies)
Morphotrophic by Greg Egan (John Knych @ Ancillary Review of Books)
On Sundays She Picked Flowers by Yah Yah Scholfield (Briana Wilvert @ The Lesbrary)
On Sundays She Picked Flowers by Yah Yah Scholfield (Mahvesh Murad @ Reactor)
On the Calculation of Volume II by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J. Haveland (Roseanna Pendlebury @ A Reader of Else)
Red City by Marie Lu (Rachel @ The Shades of Orange)
She Who Knows series by Nnedi Okorafor (Galen Strickland @ Templeton Gate)
She Who Knows series by Nnedi Okorafor (Dina @ SFF Book Reviews)
Winter’s Orbit by Everina Maxwell (Cheryl Morgan @ Salon Futura).

B-Side

The Year of Tolkien continues! Roseanna is back with her adventure through The Lord of the Rings with the beginning of The Two Towers. Shelved by Genre finished The Hobbit. Pages Unbound has a discussion question up for people to participate in: Does The Lord of the Rings Present Good and Evil as Black and White? I’m unqualified to answer this question, but other people did! In a twist I didn’t see coming, Liz Bourke dug into Aragorn’s tax policy. Not me being sad over the murder of baby orcs on a random Thursday!

Nerds of a Feather published their recommended reading lists for the Hugos and other awards: fiction; visual work; individual categories; and institutional categories. Arturo discussed Arco and I immediately added it to my watch list. And while not on Nerds of a Feather, Stewart Hotston, a new NoaF contributor, talked about Predator: Badlands on his blog.

Once Upon A VHS discussed FernGully: The Last Rainforest, and reminded me I need a physical copy of this film. Sword & Laser released Episode #528. Skiffy and Fanty has an episode about 2025 favorites and 2026 anticipations. Octothorpe is back with more convention news. They discussed the Worldcon bid for Nuremberg, but I admit to being softhearted for the Brisbane team. The last time we tried to have a con in their area COVID forced it online, and I’m very tempted to vote for them for 2028. It’s a hard choice!

Andy Weir won the Heinlein Award. He also casually used generative AI…? Congrats to him on winning a creative writing award and…using the image generator built from exabytes of stolen art from his artistic colleagues? The Ignytes are excellent and important to the SFF field, but they’re not free to run. If you can help the admins reduce their out of pocket costs, please do! I love how happy winners and finalists are, and would love for this award to continue without draining the admins who do the invisible labor to make it possible for us to enjoy. If you’re still looking for stuff to nominate for the various awards, A.C. Wise has continued collecting eligibility posts and recommended reading lists, and recently did an update.

LAcon announced that the Hugo Award nominations were open, and the post quotes on Bluesky filled with eligibility announcements and recommendations. I trawled through these for interesting threads and found a very important one: Alex Brown talked about nominating for the Lodestar. Us Lodestar fans would like people to stop nominating adult books for this award, even if it “feels” YA. :D Multiple people were confused about nominating for the awards (you do not have to attend the con to nominate or vote). I have only ever attended two Worldcons but have been a voter every year for a (gulp) decade-ish.

The 2025 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes were announced, and Reactor has the list of the SFF finalists. I have a list of all the reviews of the nominated books I’ve read from the SFF community.

• The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones: Red Headed Femme; Runalong the Shelves; Tar Vol on; Camestros Felapton

• The Death of Mountains by Jordan Kurella: Runalong the Shelves

• Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor: A Meal of Thorns; Randomly Yours, Alex; Tar Vol on

• Esperance by Adam Oyebanji: Harare Review of Books; Adrienne Martini @ Locus; Eric Hendel @ Strange Horizons

Shockingly, I have no reviews of Luminous by Silvia Park, because I suspect it came out before I got better about archiving what I was reading. I have a whole system now. Organized people would be very impressed, and then a second later, horrified by the state of my tags. Anyway, if you reviewed or discussed Luminous (any time, things being is “too old” is fake) or one of the other books, send me the link. I want to read it.

There was going to be a third season of Severance, but now there’s also going to be a fourth season since Apple bought the rights. Maybe Apple could also invest in releasing their shows on disc, as a treat for us physical media folks. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Magic: the Gathering set has great art, but I’m just here for the pizza lands. The Time Traveler’s Wife is getting The Time Traveler’s Wife 2; I’m never sure how to feel about these types of sequels. Is the Hollywood sequel engine coming to books? Is the book going to read like an inevitable screenplay? We’ll see if the urge strikes me to read it once it’s out and the library hold list is less than 1000 people deep.

In short fiction, Tar Vol on reviews Clarkesworld and GigaNotoSaurus for February 2026. Maria Haskins reviews issues of Cast of Wonders, Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Kaleidotrope from 2025. A.C. Wise reviews the November 2025 issue of Clarkesworld. Paula Guran looks at November 2025 issues of The Dark, Uncanny, The Deadlands, and Apex.

Read excerpts of The Rainseekers by Matthew Kressel and The Sun and the Starmaker by Rachel Griffin at Nerd Daily. Read an excerpt of Cabaret in Flames by Hache Pueyo at Reactor. Emmie Christie has a writer spotlight for Dee Holloway. Here’s a cool interview with Moses Ose Utomi, author of the Forever Desert series. Alexis Hall is at The Fantasy Hive for an interview about Hell’s Heart. At Largehearted Boy, Yah Yah Scholfield shares a music playlist to go along with On Sundays She Picked Flowers.

Some last tidbits from my saved bookmarks on Bluesky: Book Riot did a round up of the best romance books of the century (so far), and there are several genre options. This meme, because my book problem isn’t my fault.

For more great SFF links, check out Wombling Along.

Art recs: rainbows by gdbee; studio-mates by shafer brown; Aardvarks & Pen-igiri by Joy; Year of the Fire Horse by Deb JJ Lee; Candle Jammy by Zuccnini; Flirting for food (don’t get swindled) by Nina; cat on a rug! by berneri; fawn bunny & tidal wave by meyo; Cat squares by Aubo; Soft Spoken by Katie Croonenbergh

Outro

At the beginning of 2026, I pledged that I was going to work hard, write well, and earn 250 email subscribers before 2027. In about 25 or so new subscribers, I’m gonna need a fresh goal. This is unexpected and incredible; it couldn’t have happened without y’all sharing the newsletter with folks. I’m really honored you let me into your inboxes each week. Thanks for reading! — Renay