Gentle readers,

I've been head-down in deadline mode, finishing my story for What Elegant Stars, and news for you has been piling up. Here's a scrap of food description from an early draft:

Zost had been the second one born in the fourth generation, which made him perpetually an oldest child, a cleaner-up of messes. Relaying the disasters caused by his fourth-sixth and fourth-seventh cousins brought them to one of Theleto Station's many food halls. Seized by a sudden fit of homesickness, Zost bought a bowl of mung beans. The food hall would heap unlimited cilantro and turnip pickle on top, and Zost did not hold back, but today he did not ask for bread.

Astapai's meal was all bread, rolled up with some sort of reddish paste like a spiral galaxy. They tapped the smiling confirmation twice, making it beep. "Do you see that hat?"

(That draft is old enough that Zost and Astapai were labeled X and Y; I filled them in before I shared with you.)

There's a profile of me in this month's Ann Arbor Observer. It's paywalled, but there's a photo of me on the website, and I scavenged a couple of print copies for my relatives. In other exciting news, my poem Beyond the Standard Model is a finalist for this year's Rhysling Award! That means it will be reprinted in this year's Rhysling Anthology. I'll tell you how to buy it once that's possible; alternatively, if you want to guarantee your poetry supply, you can join the Science Fiction Poetry Association. (SFPA membership comes with the right to nominate a single Rhysling poem; I'm grateful to the person who chose "Beyond the Standard Model" as their absolute favorite.)

Meanwhile, the Ancillary Review of Books is in the final days of its first Kickstarter. I've written for ARB before, and appeared on its podcast, Meal of Thorns. ARB and Meal of Thorns are both Hugo finalists this year (in the fanzine and fancast categories), which means I can claim some tiny fraction of Hugo finalist status. (It's a larger fraction than the year the entire Archive of Our Own won a Hugo!) ARB is doing really interesting work. The Kickstarter will allow it to pay writers (and maybe even editors); support it if you'd like to increase the odds of me writing long, complicated book reviews.

I wrote short book reviews of Ann Leckie's Radiant Star and Fonda Lee's Last Contract of Isako recently, using the psychological trick of composing in a buffer that will only fit one sentence at a time. Radiant Star is out today. If you take my advice and read it against Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, I'd love to hear your thoughts. My friend Marie's hive-mind novella Multitude is out today, too--I did some math consulting on this one, listing all the ways that a genuinely exciting insight could be overlooked.

I was touched recently to discover North Continent Ribbon on AD Sui's list of the best military sci-fi books. This title is a bit of a misnomer: it's more a list of books for turning over the problems and methods of military indoctrination. (Sui's novella Dragonfly Gambit fits in that same circle, as does Leckie's Ancillary Justice, and, in certain forms and moods, the work of Yoon Ha Lee--including Code and Codex, which I'm reading in ARC now.)

Here's Gennoveus with lots of stripes:

And here's a bonus stripey creature:

Yours,

Ursula.