Sidetracks - April 17, 2025

[helloladies]

Sidetracks is a collaborative project featuring various essays, videos, reviews, or other Internet content that we want to share with each other. All past and current links for the Sidetracks project can be found in our Sidetracks tag. You can also support Sidetracks and our other work on Patreon.

Renay

1. A new week, a new reminder to drop SFF material you've liked into the Hugo Awards Rec Collection. This year I'm out in the internet streets begging people to share new 2025 board games they like and to go in on the fan categories. Your favorite folks can be nominated under a pseud and everything (I know privacy concerns for fanwork are a thing).

2. FIYAH Issue #34 is out! Digital copies are available here.

3. After the Hugo Award finalists dropped, there was more discourse about how Tor continues to dominate the category. Eddie Clark did a post listing some Nebugo Awards Novella & Novel shortlists.

4. The first week of April, the WYRMHOLE released a banger issue that I cannot find in their public archives. The whole intro was a trippy short story. Anyway, I recommend this newsletter a HOLE bunch if you're looking for fun nonfiction recs. It's sporadic for me because I'm a free user, but it's a fun burst of delight whenever I see it in my inbox. There's a whole Patreon for WYRMHOLE, full of probably exciting things and even more recs.

5. Brandon O'Brien wrote a post about convention and travel safety that's worth reading/considering.

Put at its very simplest, the present case is that lots of cis white people now are experiencing what it is like to travel to the US as a person of colour or trans person in 2016—and lots of people of colour and trans people are bracing for things to get much worse than they have already escalated to.

6. The Great Spring 2025 Book Preview from The Millions is out. Even though the coverage is mostly of contemporary fiction/nonfiction, I always love seeing what's out there. Speculative fiction crops up pretty often!

7. Stitch & Bitch did their Hugo finalist special and I crashed the party several times. As always, it's a solid discussion!

8. Things I didn't expect to be interested in again: The Hunger Games series? But wildly, with the release of the new book I have been very into people's thoughts about it. Like, for example Foz Meadows doing a whole lecture responding to "The Hunger Games does read conservative to me." Will I be rereading this series so I can read the two new books? Maaaaybe.

9. The Aurora shortlists are out. I'm excited to see The Siege of Burning Grass by Premee Mohamed on the list, which I read last year and chewed on for a few weeks.

10. Aurealis shortlists are out, as well. This award is fascinating for me because I find so much stuff that I never see, either because there's no marketing for it in the US or because whatever marketing there is I miss. I haven't explored the full list yet, but am happy for all the finalists and pleased to see Freya Marske getting series recognition for the whole of The Last Binding. It was such a well-developed series!

11. Sir Julius Vogel Award finalists are out, too. All the award finalists, all at once!

12. I watched a gameplay trailer of South of Midnight last year and thought it was so pretty. Now that the game is out, I caught the official game trailer and it looks incredible. I will have to find a way to play it that doesn't involve XBox, though.

13. KJ finished Veilguard. I have not played any Dragon Age at all, but I have to admit the commentary from this round has tempted me to start the series once I finish my Final Fantasy VI playthrough (which I am determined to finish this time).

14. Murderbot approaches and we have the power to help! According to Martha Wells, if US viewers add it to our watchlists, it helps the powers that be know people are excited. My excitement, as someone who has reread the series approximately seven times, is worth the excitement of ten people. But alas, I can only add it to my watch list once.

15. Just checking…everyone else is randomly going to rewatch the Murderbot trailer for a dose of happy chemicals multiple times a day, right?

16. Last week's Rec Center led me to Best Picture nominees ranked by their AO3 output, and this is the kind of journalism/data I rely on the Rec Center to bring me.

17. The tariff thing…happened (no guarantee we won't all be going through this again in 90 days). We all mourned our 401ks and savings. I checked out before it was over because I simply…couldn't. This summary was pretty useful, and may be useful to others if they also checked out like I did.

18. Trump to the USA: There Is No Rule of Law.

19. Part of the reason I'm like, "Hmm, The Hunger Games..." is because I've discovered the songs from the film adaptation of The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, like this one.

Watch on YouTube