Greetings from Minnesota.

I moved here from San Francisco Bay Area 18 years ago. It's not a perfect place to live, but it's one of the best places to live, and my fondness for it, which was immediate, has only grown and deepened over time.

For this issue, I have some thoughts for you from some recent reading. But first two updates:

1. My essay What if we read A Mourning Coat as Urban Fantasy? made the Ancillary Review of Books list of notable 2025 criticism.
2. I started writing a novella on Thanksgiving Day and finished the first draft of it a few days before the end of 2025. This isn't notable productivity for some writers, but it's a blistering pace for me. I need to let it sit for a month or so, but if I like what I see when I return to it (and I'm 90% sure I will), my plan is to put it through the revisions and edits it needs so I can publish it this fall. I don't want to describe it too much just yet, but I will say that I've used this tag line on the internet for years partly in jest (because I got annoyed by every novel being labeled as genre-bending or -breaking) and partly in serious — "gently painting genre (and sometimes lit fic) into a corner" — and this novella is finally addressing what's in the parentheses. It is titled 11 bookmarks, and I'm considering describing it as speculative pseudo-autofiction, which overpromises what it is, but isn't way off base. More on it in future issues.

Teffi on writers and endings

Teffi's Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea is both absurd and chilling, cold and warm, light and heavy, and the last paragraph (which I won't spoil here) will wreck you.

Born Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya, Teffi wrote poems, stories, plays, tales, feuilletons, and more. Her work was often humorous, sometimes satirical, and was very popular in Russia. She was a major celebrity in her time. She was also a political revolutionary, but one not in the same camp as Lenin, and so she (along with many other intellectuals and artists) had to flee the country as the Leninists consolidated power in the wake of the October revolution.

Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea is the account of her journey from Moscow to Kiev to Odessa and then (very memorably by boat) to Novorossiisk. The circumstances of her travel each step of the way are darkly absurd as are the hopes (and often the actions) of those fleeing Lenin's forces. Although, of course, we have the benefit of knowing the actual currents of history. The situation was much more fluid back then.

What I found remarkable about Teffi's memoir is how the dark humor of it both obscures and highlights the scattering and destruction of the robust, heterogenous, cosmopolitan artistic and intellectual communities in St. Petersburg and Moscow. It's an elegy, but one cloaked in Teffi's unique style. I came away from it with an appreciation for both how fragile and how resilient people and communities can be.

I also need to share a passage near the end that talks about a longtime fascination of mine — endings (especially those of short stories and novels):

"People often complain that a writer has botched the last pages of a novel, that the ending is somehow crumpled, too abrupt.

I understand now that a writer involuntarily creates in the image and likeness of fate itself. All endings are hurried, compressed, broken off.

When a man has died, we all like to think that there was a great deal he could still have done.

When a chapter of life has died, we all think that it could have somehow developed and unfolded further, that its conclusion is unnaturally compressed and broken off. The events that conclude such chapters of life seem tangled and skewed, senseless and without definition.

In its own writings life keeps to the formulae of old fashioned novels. We learn from the epilogue that 'Irina got married and I have heard tell she is happy. Sergey Nikolaevich was able to forget his troubles through service to society.'

All too quick and hurried, all somehow beside the point." (229) [from the 2016 NYRB edition].

On worldbuilding in Asunder and Luminous

Kerstin Hall's Asunder and Silvia Park's Luminous have similar things to teach us about worldbuilding. Luminous is one of the best works of SF&F published last year (see Abigail Nussbaum's Locus review), but even though I have some reservations about Asunder (for my complaints with it, see this this review by Stewart Hotson; for a different point of view, see Liz Bourke's Locus review), I found it an enchanting read due to the robust, imaginative worldbuilding.

Here are a few observations on the successes they both achieve and why you should read them if you're interested in SF&F worldbuilding:

1. These two novels understand that new technologies/magic manifest differently among different cultures
2. They understand that politics and culture are layered and those caught in their structures have doubts and disagreements even if they represent/enforce a dominant view
3. They understand that technologies/magic reshape the world, but the extent and nature of that reshaping varies by location/region
4. They understand that technologies/magic reshape the world, but the extent and nature of that reshaping varies by class/personal background
5. They don't bother to explain every single aspect of every piece of worldbuilding

I'm not going to spin this out into an entire essay (thus why it's confined to the boundaries of a newsletter edition), but I will share a couple of examples.

In Asunder, the primary gods (the heralds) have been killed, but the miracles they had the power to grant can still be effectuated by using metaphor (or derivations) to still call upon the power of a miracle (which is, after all, a warping of reality) even though the person doing so is without divine sanction. This gets referred to, depending on the culture describing it, as something akin to engineering or to poetry, but the beauty of such a system of magic is that there is room for lots of innovation, but also always the possibility of failure, and also because it's new, the way it gets expressed varies. For example, in one area, travel over long distance is able to happen by boarding the interior of a humongous spider that can "phase" between dimensions by traveling along a spider web that seems to be on another plane of existence. Meanwhile, in a different culture, a similar type of travel manifests as trains that show up at each station, but the travel between stations is also in-between. And both containers for travel have a strange mix of the organic and the engineered so that while they seem very different from each other, they also aren't completely so.

One could chalk up such wildly different manifestations of similar modes of travel as just the author wanting to put cool stuff they made up into their novel. And, of course, there's nothing wrong with that, and I'm sure that's part of it. But what Asunder does is ground the spider and train in the local cultures and in the variable (but linked) magic systems. What's more, because there's a lot of conjecture and potential instability of the source and working of the herald's power, there's always the sense that thing could mutate or topple over at any point. Which means the societies in Asunder don't feel fixed in place and all of one layer in the way societies in secondary world fantasy novels often do.

There's this same feeling in Luminous, which could be best described as near future dystopian cyberpunk, although while each of those labels are completely accurate in terms of the setting, they don't quite get at what the novel is trying to do.

In Luminous humanoid robots exist as servants, workers, companions (sometimes romantic), children, etc. They all contain some sort of artificial intelligence, but it's by no means perfect (or perfectly understood) and what that means varies by robotics manufacturer and robot model and edition of a robot model. Non-humanoid robots also exist. And what types of robots, in terms of form, function, sophistication, newness, etc. varies widely by one's class and family/cultural background. Thus, although they exist, how different characters relate/feel about humanoid robots is unique to each character. These differences allow Park to explore the fundamental question of what it means to be human (or what it means to have agency), which makes it sound a lot more obvious and ponderous than the novel actually is.

Luminous take place in a "unified" Korea. Thanks to its robust tech industry and the work of two pioneering roboticists, Seoul has become a world leader in robotic companions. But even in Korea the legal and other bureaucratic systems haven't quite caught up with what that means. For example, the Seoul police force has just two detectives assigned to crimes against robots. These crimes are taken somewhat more seriously when they are committed against child-like robotic companions, but even then the harshest punishments are fines because robots are consider "property." And, indeed, some owners feel that's obvious and appropriate even though the psychology of those who kidnap/harm humanoid robots is clearly messed up. When something bad happens to one of their robotic boys or girls, they just go out and purchase a new one.

This state of affairs gets complicated when an older woman, an artist, who has treated her robotic companion as both a child and a work of art demands that the detectives find this companion, who has gone missing. Their investigation both unravels and pulls together several storylines, which allows Park to explore the questions she's interested in, questions that are fundamental to both science fiction and literature, in ways that astounded me in how the details at the sentence level resonate with the larger worldbuilding.

To be honest, I'd grown a bit tired of the worldbuilding aspects of SF&F over the past few years and have been seeking more works that resist that kind of approach to fiction (thus my preoccupation with the work of Han Kang and M. John Harrison). However, titles like Asunder and Luminous plus Isaac Fellman's Notes from a Regicide (another excellent novel published in 2025) have rejuvenated my understanding of what worldbuilding can achieve.

I'm not in any danger of reading (let alone writing) a ten book epic fantasy series, but I will be on the look out for more titles like these. Suggestions always welcome!

See you in March!