Lady Business

Let's Get Literate! Platform Decay by Martha Wells

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 01:09:35 GMT

Posted by: renay

It's hard to write about an advanced reader copy of one of the most coveted science fiction releases of the quarter. I tried, multiple times, to collect some thoughts about Platform Decay, the latest release in The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. I failed, every time, because my love for this series is immense, but also hard to quantify. Finding the words to describe sincere emotions? Ugh. Therefore, Platform Decay is already out, and you can read it now via your library or favorite indie bookstore!

Platform Decay is the eighth entry in The Murderbot Diaries, following our hero as it stages a high stakes rescue on Corporate Ringworld. It's working apart from its usual allies, it must infiltrate and escape the station with several squishy humans, and oh right, a former enemy asks for its help, complicating the extraction. Nothing can go wrong!

(Things immediately go wrong.)

To make matters worse, it's also dealing with an emotional health module. What's more stressful than a hostage situation in corporate territory? Mobile therapy. Murderbot must protect its humans (no pressure), avoid corporate forces that would love to slurp its kidnapped humans into corporate slavery (assholes), and navigate across a hostile station where one mistake could cost it everything (business as usual!).

Now that Platform Decay is out in the world, along with the news that the series is getting close to wrapping up, I decided to take another swing at writing about the book in the context of the whole series to see if I could unpack my thoughts. There be light spoilers here, so if you are one of the folks who haven't tried the series, beware. If you're willing to give it a try, my suggested reading order is: All Systems Red, Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol, Exit Strategy, Fugitive Telemetry, Network Effect, System Collapse, and then Platform Decay. Some might quibble about Fugitive Telemetry, but I think it fits best as a bridge between the first arc and the second. The first novella will provide all the context you need for whether the rest of the series will work for you, tone-wise.

Back in 2017 when I read the first novella, I found that the way that Murderbot engages in media for coping with the world mirrored my own. I'm not the only one that saw themselves in Murderbot in that first novella: using media to help give the world context, to handle stress, and sometimes to figure out how to be a person. By the time I read Network Effect, in my personal life I was starting to ask serious questions about the ways I moved through the world, too.

Wells has written a character that embodies so many of us that are late diagnosed AuDHD folks, struggling with gender (this is not me, but I've seen the fan commentary), and wrestling with living inside an extractive system. They're fun stories, for sure, but they're also operating at a level that some neurodivergent people, both new and old, are going to resonate with. In interviews, Wells has spoken about her own realizations around her neurodivergent traits and how those discoveries unfolded as she created the character of Murderbot, and the way the character is written rings true to me as someone who was diagnosed well after childhood. It was the right author, with the right character, in the right cultural circumstances that became narrative and characterization gold.

The series explores various high stakes situations that Murderbot finds itself in after hacking its governor module and escaping enslavement by its company. The governor module, while inoperable, is itself a measurable force in the series through its presence and the formative experiences Murderbot had while under its control. Although inert now that Murderbot has disabled it, the memory of its punishment shadows our protagonist throughout all its adventures.

The governor module can be analyzed in a variety of ways, and I'm always fascinated when I read a review or a piece of fanfic that uncovers yet another horrific implication of this technology. The governor module and Murderbot's detachment from it is a story about those of us finally removing ourselves from the pressure of extractive capitalism. We're now able to prioritize our own mental health, physical wellbeing, and find out who we are outside that system of efficiency, productivity, and profitability. And yet, we haven't escaped extractive capitalism. We still live inside of it, must navigate it successfully, and participate in the system to survive and engage with the world. We must watch the millions of people also trapped in the system, often unaware, blithely disinterested, or actively complicit in the fact that they're captives in a machine meant to use and discard them as soon as they've been of use.

This isn't the only reading of the governor module, but it's the one most compelling to me. The anti-capitalist position of The Murderbot Diaries is one reason the series speaks so strongly to people who have been victims of its many downsides. Murderbot's human companions, that initially give it space to be itself, are from a place that values the humanity of every person and prioritizes health, safety, and wellness above all else. Murderbot often comments on the amenities of the Preservation Alliance in ways that highlight just how different the worlds driven by capitalism are structured.

What I appreciate about the world Wells created is that dystopic futures, systemic and intractable, are everywhere in space opera. Space opera is often about empire, expansion, and what future societies might look like. That's not surprising, if we look at the history of the world and how colonialism, capitalism's bitchy cousin, has dominated the last few centuries. But while Wells imagined that future, she also imagined the future of the Preservation Alliance and the Pan Systems of Mihira and New Tideland, both places founded with systems of radical care. There may be more than this; we meet characters in Rogue Protocol that come from a place where constructs are not legal. People can make choices to structure society differently and still explore, do science, and have a thriving community where people can do those things because they value collective care. The Murderbot Diaries is a dark series, but it's also offering us a vision of a future so many of us want and dream of while trapped in our own societies that mirror the Corporation Rim.

Another way I like looking at the governor module is through neurodivergence; the governor module being disabled means that Murderbot is now aware it can unmask, although initially unmasking is deadly. I'm using "masking" here to refer to autistic masking, where autistic and other neurodivergent people suppress their differences so they can be seen as neurotypical and exist in society without mistreatment. Over the series, Murderbot masks and unmasks until we reach Network Effect, where its ability to mask crumbles. It never quite comes back the same way it did in the first story arc before Murderbot makes its home in Preservation. Some of this is encountering its friend, the ship Perihelion, who it never needed to mask in front of. Perihelion, or ART as Murderbot nicknames it, immediately saw through the masking. Art says, "There are no neurotypicals here and you really suck at pretending to be one. Let me show you the high-resolution video evidence." What an asshole (complimentary).

Of course, some of Murderbot's reaction in Network Effect is being betrayed by ART, who displays more of the familiar pop culture neurodivergent traits in a way that conflicts with Murderbot's trauma. Yes, that's right: there are multiple types of neurodivergences in this series! Representation Matters™! The rest is the circumstance: great, trapped in yet another shitty Corporation Rim mess because they don't care about anything but profit, but this time it's on a scale that Murderbot can't shoot into submission. Plus, its humans are in danger. And in Network Effect, there's a virus that's causing people to behave erratically, and this virus threatens to reclaim all the freedom, both of thought and bodily autonomy, that Murderbot has clawed back for itself. It would be a return to a system it knows it can't perform in effectively enough to not be destroyed. As our live action Murderbot knows: there is no going back, there is only the acid bath (having everything that makes you yourself eradicated and discarded for not conforming to the system).

As an aside, I see way more people express discontent with Network Effect as a long form novel. I wonder if some of that is being faced with this neurodivergent character at length, rather than in bite-sized novellas. We are, as I know intimately, much easier to deal with in small doses. There's this thing where I meet people and they like me, but then after we spend any extended amount of time together it becomes clear they have changed their opinion and find me and my whole thing exhausting, aggressive, or chillingly hostile. Narratively, I don't think that's an accident. It is exhausting! Imagine being us. To be clear, I don't say this to dismiss critiques of the structure, plot, or characterizations of Network Effect others might have, just that I suspect some of the response is likely coming from the fact that Murderbot's masking skills that it employed in the novellas take a huge hit in the book. They never fully return due to the circumstances of the plot and the environment in which Murderbot gets to recover (a safe one).

If all the other works in the series are Murderbot extracting itself from a sick system and then learning a different way of being, making healthy connections with others, and experiencing what is it to live in the world without being a tool for someone else's bottom line, System Collapse operates as the moment where Murderbot accepts that not only is it never going back, it doesn't want the trauma of its past to control it any longer. Because allowing that trauma to have that much power reflects life under the governor module and the Company. It wants control for its life to remain its own, and for that to happen, it can't keep suppressing the trauma. That trauma will pop out and eat a leg (mentally) unless it (unfortunately) faces it. And so, Platform Decay introduces therapy.

Platform Decay isn't about therapy; Platform Decay is a rescue narrative, yet another justified critique of extractive capitalism, and a family drama dealing with the fallout of Murderbot and its allies tangling with the Corporation Rim. The therapy is incidental via a module that Murderbot installs to help it identify the emotions it experiences. Because Murderbot is in therapy, something different happens: we get to watch our hero engage with the trauma and humanity of its companions and see, up close and personal, the ways the Corporation Rim and its style of capitalism expresses violence on the human beings trapped in its system. It's not enough they created people like Murderbot to use and discard, they also treat human beings the same way. The ways the culture of the Rim fractures friends and families and creates the environment for those people to dehumanize each other is on full display. The people around Murderbot, especially Corporation Rim enemies, are participating in a system they can't escape because they lack the resources to do so. Anway, where would they go? The setting for Platform Decay is a planetary torus, and leaving without the permission from the corporate overlords is incredibly difficult. It's depressingly like how many of my fellow United States citizens and I are trapped in our specific mix of disaster capitalism.

Platform Decay could look like a straightforward quest narrative: find, rescue, and remove the humans from the power of the Corporation Rim. But there's deep things happening under the surface of this story that must be teased out from the way the humans interact with each other and with Murderbot and the ways Murderbot is learning to talk to itself. Now that Murderbot is learning to deal with its emotions, through it we can start to see it understand and empathize more with the people under its care and feel less distance between them that causes it to other itself when in their presence. It's finally seeing itself as an important part of a community, in direct opposition to the way the Corporation Rim does its best to crack any community building into pieces. Platform Decay is a rescue adventure, but it's also about the ways in which people in sick systems use those systems to hurt one another for even a meager shred of power and agency. The title of the book gives a hint to the themes: platform decay also refers to a term coined by Cory Doctorow, enshittification. The book is a guided tour through how the Corporation Rim ruins the things it touches while grasping for wealth and power. These systems aren't only corrupt, they corrupt the people inside them, too. There is no true power inside the Corporation Rim systems, only a facsimile of power that hollows out your humanity. The only power we have, as we see one of the humans take at the end, is rejection.

There's so much to discover in these books. Wells went to her mental lab and built us the shiniest gem of a universe. No matter which way we turn it, there's something new to examine, a new way to think about the politics and socioeconomics of the world, and endless ways to talk about mental health, gender, and autonomy. I loved Platform Decay deeply, and like all the novels in this series, will probably only grow to love it more on the many rereads I undertake of the series each year.

Now that the series is coming to a close, I wonder what the resolution of Murderbot's story will look like. I will be happy with anything. But in several books now, we've seen Murderbot free other units trapped under the governor module. In Artificial Condition, Murderbot frees a ComfortUnit. In Network Effect, Murderbot 2.0 frees Three. In System Collapse, Murderbot frees a unit on a hostile corporate team. Then, in a heroic move by our beloved introverted construct, asks that unit to escape with them, thereby risking accepting responsibility for another construct like itself. This is notable, because Murderbot makes it clear how much it doesn't want to be responsible for Three.

Speaking of Three, in Platform Decay, we watch Three go on an unfettered freedom spree, passing the hack Murderbot 2.0 made around to other units on Corporate Ringworld. This goes back to my intrigue over Wells choosing an alternate phrase for the term enshittification for the title of the book. Thematically it refers to the practice of extractive capitalism central to the Corporation Rim, where buyouts and takeovers and all the associated shenanigans often leave the assets—people—adrift or abandoned. In my universe/country, this includes people because of the way at will employment and contract labor works. It squeezes everything until there's nothing left and, in the case of digital platforms, people leave and the platform eventually fails. I'm putting on my clown costume to wonder: is the title and the way Three spends the narrative like a freedom pinball a type of foreshadowing?

I would love to see an adventure with Murderbot, ART and its crew, and Three around this topic. The Corporation Rim is powerful and have trained the people inside its system with the most power to be ruthless. However, the more controlling a system is, the more it tries to shove its people the way it wants them to go instead of allowing them choices, the more fragile it is to disruption. It's especially fragile to disruption when it comes to traumatized constructs. Murderbot can't save the whole Rim, but it could help light the spark that leads to a larger offscreen revolution. It's clear it has the tools now to be successful at everything it wants to do. It would be a nice cap to a series that begins with lazy corporations getting so many humans killed through sheer greed that a Murderbot who just wanted to watch its shows decided, "You know what? Revenge sounds really fucking nice." Corporations, don't radicalize your governor module-less security unit who decided it liked its humans unless you want it to fuck you up and fracture your society at the seams!

Whatever form the end takes, I'm confident it will be excellent. Platform Decay is a great addition to this this world, I'm excited to see what's next, and I'm extra thrilled to discover what all the creative fan writers are going to do with this infusion of new canon. As always, thanks to Tor Books for the generosity with the review copy of the book, even though it took me *checks notes* 2.5 months to provide the deliverables (this post). *salutes in ADHD* o7

Other reviews:
Red Headed Femme; Tar Vol on; Realms of my Mind; Becky's Book Blog; Smart Bitches, Trashy Books; Reading Reality; Fantasy Literature; Galen Strickland

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The Novella Question, or, Wow, Marketing is Expensive in Late Stage Capitalism

Tue, 19 May 2026 07:46:28 GMT

Posted by: renay

It’s SFF awards season again.

Many of us are looking at the novella short lists for the popular awards (Hugos, Locus, Nebula) and going, “Ah, another Tor sweep!” When I first got into the Hugo Awards, the short fiction finalists were the magazines: Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Analog. It also included pieces from short fiction collections from when publishers still let editors put those together, with a smattering of other, lesser known (to me) outlets. I remember the Tordotcom announcement, too! We were excited and we’ve come a long way. Now I get the pleasure of paying almost $30 for a hardcover novella, which I’m not excited about. I'm not made of money, Macmillan!

Tor has the reach both online and in bookstores. They have the money to pay popular authors well. They have the money for marketing to back up their editorial selections. Many beloved and respected editors work for them. They also hold decades of name recognition. As Tordotcom has grown and dominated the novella format, they've unsurprisingly dominated the award short lists in the novella category. A few weeks ago, there was a discussion about novella coverage as Tordotcom continues to publish quality novellas and cement itself as the novella tastemaker.

On Bluesky, Eddie Clark started a thread with this:

The Hugo novella category has a tordotcom problem.

I preface this by being clear it is about the reading habits of the Hugo electorate *not* the nominees; I *really* liked the 3 novellas on this year's shortlist that I read. The issue is an almost unbelievable imprint concentration over 10 years. Since the first full year of tordotcom releases (2015, so eligible for the 2016 hugos), there have been 65 novella nominees. Of these, *45* have been from tordotcom. *Seventy percent*. Only 16 (25%) were from non-Tor outlets (there were 4 from other Tor imprints).

Eddie goes on to add some additional stats. Then Jake Casella Brookins hopped in to add another perspective:

I want to jump off this: not disagreeing exactly, because I also want to see a better spread of imprints on the Hugos, but because I've been musing on a few things about the Hugo list and how we frame issues with it.

Basically: do we have a Tor problem, or do we have an *everything else* problem? I know how I hear about books (a mix of catalogs, mags like Locus, and buzz from folks I trust on social media). But I'm a reviewer/editor.

I do not know how the average Hugo nominator is hearing about books. I presume that libraries & bookstores are in the mix, but I don't know what to extent.

He goes on to talk about the logistical problems of discovery. The conversation went off in several directions and now I can't find those posts (I miss blogs and threaded comments so much), but the general consensus seemed to be:

The smaller magazines publishing novellas don't have the marketing budget or labor agency to do the type of promotion that would break through the noise machine that is The Internet.
These publishers may be digital-only or digital-only with a paywall, which adds additional layers of friction for some readers and also reduces discoverability, which Tor has because their physical novellas sit on shelves across the U.S.
It might be hard for smaller publishers to get into any library at all. Related: massive U.S. library budget cuts due to fascism and white nationalism, which reduces materials budgets especially for digital items, which are often more expensive than physical books due to the way licenses work.

I immediately found a solution but was banned from implementation (harsh but fair). The nearest thing we have is work already being done by Andrew Liptak at Transfer Orbit in his monthly Table of Contents column. It's not novella specific, although it would automatically include novellas, but he doesn't break the lists out by story length. We also have Roseanna Pendlebury's Small Press Dispatch, which looks at novellas from small presses, but Roseanna is, alas, only one human. She still needs to sleep and cannot identify all the small press novellas for us.

I'm in the same place as a lot of reviewers. I'm limited by what I hear about, and I have to be deliberate about looking for things. But I'm a special case, too, because one of my Very Special Interest is recs. I'm paying closer attention than most to what other people like. I've been expanding who I follow for short fiction coverage, especially on social media, but it's not always enough to be able to capture everything. Sometimes novellas are promoted, but not explicitly as novellas, the specific 17,500 – 40,000 word category. If reviewers are struggling, and people who trawl the Internet for recs are struggling, what's the answer?

When I zoom out to think about the problem, I'm not convinced it's one with an immediate solution. We're in a moment of Tordotcom novella dominance due to their resources. People have been efficiently siloed into standalone social media apps, too. Those apps never want people to leave and make it extremely difficult to do so, making discoverability a massive issue for anyone doing creative work while also competing with all the generative AI and bots taking over every platform. Over at the Hugo Spreadsheet of Doom, every year some hero adds the tracking to tell us how many of the novella recs are Tor so we know when we're getting publisher dense. But that only highlights the problem; it doesn't solve it unless other folks add the non-Tor novellas they liked.

To wrap up, I don't think it's the responsibility of readers/fans alone to fix this issue and trying might result in a lot of frustration. Those of who care can take steps for ourselves, but systemic change seems out of reach at the moment. There was a time before Tordotcom novella dominance, and there will be a time after, likely for a reason we can't predict from our current perspective. There are other awards that often honor non-Tordotcom novellas, too, so it's not hopeless out there! For those who want to help offset the domination of one publisher the best answer I've got is to be as loud as possible about non-Tordotcom novellas. Only when we're sick of ourselves and feel obnoxious, have we, perhaps, pierced the bubble of Internet Noise. There's no guarantee, of course, but being excited about things we love is never a bad idea and most people aren't going to begrudge anyone their excitement. Whether it's general shouting, more and regular rec lists (open or themed), a podcast dedicated to novella-length SFF work, novella-only rec calls on social media, or novella publisher roundups, there are tons of ideas for people passionate about the format to put into practice. All the aforementioned ideas are free to a good home; if I try I'll have to face the wrath of my friends and I'm not risking it. :D

If you'd like, stick your recs for small press SFF publishers in the comments!

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I'm a Hugo Finalist!?

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 04:23:47 GMT

Posted by: renay

Hugo finalists were announced and the thing I've been sitting on for several weeks is out. Wow.

In 2024, when I was burnt to an intellectual crisp, I decided that 2025 would be a year where I focused more on refilling my creative cup. I didn't know what that looked like at the time I made the decision. I only knew I had to take a break from my political organizing and volunteer work and do something by me, for me, centering me. It was me-o'clock so I could become less of husk that had no personality or interests besides "annoying fascists in my community" and "managing data for a political org". Still important, but everyone needs a break.

As summer approached and I started to emerge from my Emotional Regulation Cocoon, I decided I wanted a place to engage in a special interest (organizing information, reccing things) about my special interests (SFF, media, fandom, technology). I wanted a space that didn't have any baggage attached, because I've been writing on Lady Business so long I've had lots of time to make media literacy mistakes that continue to follow me around. I love Lady Business and I hope to write here in long form for many years to come! But I share Lady Business with the other editors. I didn't want to take it over wholesale. If I launched a new project on another platform, I could...maybe not start over, but start fresh. I could let people opt-in, instead of trying to force a new project to fit into an existing structure.

For ages my main group chat, Sparkle Rocket, had talked about a SFF newsletter. We knew it could be cool, even though it would be a lot of work. None of us took the dive, because as aforementioned: the work! And yet, once I let myself imagine it the idea coalesced quickly because one of the things that rooted me in fandom was reccing culture and book blogging. With the rise of social media platforms and the consolidation of many different parts of fandom I participated in, reccing/book discussion culture felt like it had faded away. I knew it was still out there, even if it was smaller and harder to find. I know I'm not the only one fighting to resist our algorithmic present! A SFF newsletter where I could be a big, earnest nerd? It felt right, because reading other people talking about things is like a battery for me. The feeling you get when you see someone doing something you also love doing and it inspires you? That.

Intergalactic Mixtape (IGMX for short) was created as a way to rec things I enjoyed or projects that inspired me. It gave me space and mental permission to make time for myself and my own reading. IGMX also helped me recover my ability to read new books, not only reread favorites on a loop (everyone should read Finder by Suzanne Palmer tho, it's a banger). It helped with my attention span, which social media had bodied. It helped with my writing confidence in general. I'm not the greatest writer and I'm still learning, but I have verve! I have perspective! I have hot takes! IGMX has also been an exercise in learning how to be more concise. Being concise is hard. See: this post! It's okay, though, because I gave myself permission to go on a bit this time. The practice is important because Google will absolutely truncate my emails. IGMX has been a good exercise for this writing muscle, though, and I'm excited to keep learning.

I was right about the old internet, too. The internet-before-algorithms still exists, even though we were so efficiently herded into social media silos and apps. My favorite thing about technology is that no matter what, people are going to build communities, even if the creators of those technologies never intended those tools for strong community building. As I build out my RSS feeds and bookmark people's blogs and portfolio sites, I've stopped worrying about losing micro-blogs or short form video. IGMX has shown me that no matter what, we'll find a way to rebuild our communities and reconnect. We're still out there, writing and sending our thoughts into the void, hoping to find our people.

When I got the email about my nominations (because I'm also nominated in Best Related Work, for the Hugo Spreadsheet of Doom, which is a whole different bucket of emotions), my flabbers were gasted. My thunders? Radically struck. Because my newsletter isn't even a year old! It's still shaking pieces of eggshell off its scales (in this example IGMX is a tiny, freshly hatched dinosaur). I feel really grateful and sentimental about all the open arms people have offered as IGMX has grown, but y'all, the nomination really fucked me up (complimentary). I cried a lot (positive) about it before accepting. I'm probably going to cry when editing this essay (ed. note: accurate).

I'm in the Best Fanzine category with incredible people, many of them pals and SFF community colleagues: Nerds of a Feather, Ancillary Review of Books, An Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog, Galactic Journey, and Journey Planet. In this hellscape of LLM generation and efficiency-maxing, where writing about media is being devalued and defunded at every turn, here's a group of us writing about stories—books and movies and games and culture—for the love of the game. You can still support me on Patreon, though! A lady's got to ~~buy more books~~ eat.

What they say about the nomination not feeling real until the announcement is accurate. Plus, it's different this time because it's just me, not an editorial collective where I can hide, socially anxious, behind the other editors. I remind myself that this is what happens when you get brave, take a chance on an idea that brings you joy, and take up space in the world as yourself. People see you.

Thanks for seeing me, y'all.

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Graphic Novel Favorites From My Recent Reading

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 16:14:42 GMT

Posted by: forestofglory

After years of struggling to read new-to-me fiction, I’ve recently entered a phase of reading graphic novels and comics and I’ve been reading so much! (It helps that I accidentally got into a comics-based fandom via stress-reading fic late last year.) It’s only April yet I have already read more books this year than I have in any year since 2020, it's truly wild. I haven’t had this much fun reading in ages!

I wanted to share some of the things I’ve been enjoying, so I thought I’d write a rec list. I find graphic novels easier to focus on when I’m stressed than prose novels, and I also love getting to see so much art. I’ve been mostly reading MG and YA works – it feels like there is a lot going on in that space right now! Plus it’s a space where there tend to be many stories focused on friendship, which I really enjoy. I’ve also been choosing more lighthearted things to read. The world is stressful and I can’t deal with stressful reading at the moment.

Lumberjanes by N.D. Stevenson, Shannon Watters, et al.— I read about half of this series years and years ago, but was inspired to go back and reread what I’d read and then read the rest for the first time. These are so much fun! The comic is about five girls who share a cabin at Lumberjanes summer camp, in a magical and mysterious forest. Many magical hijinx ensue. I love the friendships and the colorful expressive art!

Gotham Academy by Becky Cloonan et al.— This is an extremely fun series about a group of friends who attend boarding school and solve mysteries together. I loved all the characters but especially Mia "Maps" Mizoguchi, who is the kind of smart and chaotic character that I love, but that I rarely see female versions of. This has a kinda spooky vibe but I wouldn’t call it scary (which is a good thing, I’m too squishy for scary media). Zero Batman knowledge is required for these to make sense. So don't let that hold you back from enjoying the boarding school mystery solving shenanigans.

The Space Cat by Nnedi Okorafor, art by Tana Ford— I was very excited when I learned that Nnedi Okorafor had written a graphic novel about a cat! And that excitement was totally justified. This is a fun book about a cat having adventures, inspired by Okarofar’s real cat. I loved the cat's approach to life – very catly. Also the art is wonderful and perfect for this story!

Sanity & Tallulah by Molly Brooks— This a series of three middle-grade graphic novels set in space. Sanity and Tallulah are two girls who live on a space station and are best friends. They have madcap adventures! I really liked the way the world building in this series kept expanding outward, and the reader slowly learns more and more about the wider world.

Shadow of the Batgirl written by Sarah Kuhn, art by Nicole Goux— An alternative origin story for Cassadra Cain, the second Batgirl (but you don’t need any background info to understand this). Featuring libraries, mentorship, noodles and the power of romance novels. This is just so cute and fun!

The Ribbon Skirt by Cameron Mukwa— An extremely charming story about a two-spirit and nonbinary Anishinaabe kid who decides to make a ribbon skirt for an upcoming powwow. There are talking turtle spirits! (content note: transphobia)

Mamo by Sas Milledge— A fantasy graphic novel about two young women trying to fix a town where the magic has gone wrong. I loved the relationship between the two of them and all the magical worldbuilding. Also the art was so pretty! I had to stop and stare at several of the pages.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl by Ryan North, Erica Henderson, et al— So I haven’t finished reading these yet, but they are so much I had to include them anyway. Squirrel Girl is a girl with the same proportionate strength and agility as a squirrel – in this comic she’s also a computer science student. I love how nerdy the whole thing is, and how much joy the creators take in that. I also love Squirrel Girl’s creative approach to problem solving. Her various friends are great too! The collected editions include the letters pages, and they are great, featuring many cute pictures of cosplay and squirrels and fun responses to questions.

Taproot by Keezy Young—A lovely graphic novel about a gardener who can see ghosts. I loved all the lush plants! The whole book was really sweet. (CW: several of the ghosts are kids)

I’d love to hear about any graphic novels you’ve been enjoying!

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Guest Review: Empathizing with the Abuser: The Poet Empress by Shen Tao

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 01:02:16 GMT

Posted by: helloladies

Please welcome our anonymous reviewer!

The Poet Empress by Shen Tao is a debut Chinese-inspired fantasy centered on a poor village girl who rises from a concubine to the empress-in-waiting to an abusive prince heir. In a bid to save the kingdom from the tyranny of his reign, Wei decides to kill him in the only way she can, by writing a magic poem. Only deathly poems have to be love poetry, and only by knowing him well enough to love him can she kill him.

Contrary to what you might expect, given the popularity of romantasy and enemies-to-lovers, The Poet Empress is not a romance. I do want to make that clear. Whatever faults the book has, a HEA for an abusive relationship is not one. On that note, I will be discussing the end of The Poet Empress and there will be spoilers throughout.

It is also important to note that the book itself contains content warnings for physical and sexual violence, including against children. I will be discussing these elements in my review.

The story opens with Wei taking her beloved younger brother to town during a festival and discovering that the infamous Prince Terren is newly appointed heir over his older brother Maro. The royal court is thus scouting for thirty concubines to fill Terren’s palace, for it is of utmost importance that he create at least one heir.

Although the importance of an heir is a common trope in both history and fantasy fiction, The Poet Empress lends it additional importance by intertwining the hereditary monarchy with the world’s magic system. Magic comes from the composition of poetry, which even the illiterate can scrawl in the dirt and have spells take effect. Women are barred from literacy, on pain of death, and even among the literate, magical poetry is its own skill and profession that cannot be easily completed by anyone. Then there’s a second magical system interwoven within the first: the magic of the imperial seal.

Long ago, the founder of the dynasty gained or created a great magic that would pass solely through his male descendants (with great difficulty in conception). Princes would be born with a circular mark, or seal, upon their cheek, which would eventually manifest a character that would dictate the nature of their magic. Terren, for instance, can control blades, sending swords and daggers flying across a room with a wave of his hand. The origins of the seal magic are not explored, and the book only mentions in passing that there was a time before the seal magic. Daughters are either not born at all or are completely irrelevant and not magical; I never gathered a clear picture of any possibilities relating to imperial princesses. In a book concerned with power and patriarchy, the elusion of any exploration of the male-only nature of seal magic struck me as interesting.

Returning to the story, Wei’s village is starving from a long-lasting famine, and she seizes the chance to gain favor for her village by becoming an imperial concubine. The reasoning for the court eunuch, Li Ciyi, selecting Wei is flimsy at best and reads mostly as a narrative contrivance to get to where the plot needs her to be. Her appointment to empress-in-waiting happens similarly quickly, with the implication being that Terren chooses her as an act of insolent defiance, not caring if he angers the well-placed families of the other girls.

Wei soon sees Terren’s cruelty first hand when he kills a ridiculously ineffective assassin. When he summons her to chambers at night, he never makes any sexual advances towards her but does routinely torture her. He cuts her with his knives, he forces her to eat until she vomits, he drowns her in a pond, and he forces her into a barrel of starving rats.

“Terren called on me often. Not every night, not even every week, but often enough that every day, when the afternoon light waned and the shadows of my windows’ lattices grew long on the floor, I would begin to breath fast. My chest would tighten with the panicked hammering of my heart. I would taste bitter bile in my mouth just anticipating Hesin’s knock on my door, which would surely be accompanied by the dreadful words His Highness calls you to his bedside.”

Wei’s journey through the story contains many more moments of torture. On their wedding night, Terren stabs her through the torso with a blade and leaves her to die in his drunken stupor. She considers healing herself with her illicit literacy, but she decides instead that it’s better to wait out the night and count on Terren to heal her in the morning. Later on, Wei is accused of literacy and presented with a public torture test where she inflicts magical pain on herself to prove her innocence.

For that all Wei undergoes, the torture seems to have little effect on her. Wei experiences intense trauma, but she is never traumatized. The narrative will mention how many days it takes her to physically recover, but psychological damage is never explored. The quote I mentioned above regarding her anxiety about being called to Terren’s bedchamber stands out to me as one of the very few moments where the book acknowledges any sort of psychological impact. I found a persistent emotional shallowness to the torture Wei experiences, even while the narrative describes over-the-top scenarios (such as the barrel of starving rats).

I found the emotional shallowness to be most blatant when Terren slaughters twenty-two of the servants in Wei’s quarters, sparing only an old woman whose tongue he’d already cut out before for some minor transgression and Wei’s chief eunuch, Li Ciyi. Wei had found a solace with the servants, tasking Li Ciyi to teach them to read as well as her. Wei was particularly close with her serving girl Wren.

“Wren’s hand twitched again. She was beyond help, but still alive, still suffering. I went to her, pulled one of the swords out from her torso, and plunged it into her skull.”

After Wei mercy-kills Wren, the servant girl is only brought up once more, when Wei visits the graves of the servants while trying to decide whether to go through with her assassination of Terran. She has grown a taste for the power the empress holds, and she is recently betrayed by Terran’s rival, Prince Maru. At the graves of those Terren brutally murdered, Wei decides to let him live:

“Maybe there did not have to be war, or conquest, or pain. Because I would be Terren’s empress. Because I was going to sit on the throne next to him, keep close to him, guide him onto a better path. Not the right one -- that was overly ambitious, even for the best of us -- but at the very least, a better one.

I had not become so wicked in my heart that I had stopped believing people could change. If a gentle child could turn into a monster, I thought, then surely a monster could become gentle again.”

So far I have focused this review on Wei’s suffering, but I will turn now to the narrative’s main interest: Terren’s suffering. The central questions of The Poet Empress are “What caused Terren to become so monstrous?” and “How can Wei find the humanity within him?”.

And here lies my core problem with The Poet Empress. I find the questions at the heart of it the fundamental flaw. Our culture is obsessed with seeking the humanity behind violent, abusive men. Surely there is good within him! He can’t be all bad. His future potential shouldn’t be denied because of a few past mistakes. I have heard all of these before. “Abusers are humans too,” is not a novel statement. It is tired and so often used to drown out the voices of the abused.

In the course of seeking out Terren’s backstory, Wei discovers he started as a happy child who underwent his own suffering, from betrayal of those closest to him to ongoing sexual abuse on the orders of his unloving mother. His mother herself was sold to a brothel at age nine and seems to see no problem with her young son being repeatedly raped to ensure the conception of a new magic prince.

Cynically, I think Terren’s background of childhood sexual abuse gives the narrative a rationale to avoid Wei experiencing rape. To be clear, I do not think the book would be improved by including Terren sexually assaulting Wei. I think the book would be a lot worse for it, especially given how shallow the existing treatment of torture is. I do think, though, that if Terren’s violence were sexual in nature, it would be harder for the book to maintain its focus on Terren’s humanity despite the violence he inflicts on others. At the same time, I notice that Terren’s own sexual abuse is given so much more weight than anything he inflicts on others. Terren can cut out people’s tongues when he’s in a bad mood or go on killing sprees through servants quarters. The trauma Terren inflicts on Wei slides off her, but Terren’s own trauma turns him into a sadistic killer.

The Poet Empress takes pains to show Terren’s humanity under his monstrosity. He loves fish, and he tries to save the carp from freezing during a blizzard. He was once a happy child who loved his older brother. He leaves Wei tea after the literacy test tortures. While The Poet Empress focuses on Terren’s humanity, I feel that it forgets the humanity of his victims. Wren, the slaughtered servant girl, was just as human as Terren, with her own dreams of returning to working in the palace menagerie and her excitement to learn to read. Terren mutilates her and leaves her to die in the grass, and she is hardly mentioned again. Meanwhile, the story ends with Wei giving Terren the quiet funeral he requested.

Yes, Wei does ultimately kill Terren, but only after she saves his life. She decides that she can temper Terren’s cruelty, that she can do good as his empress, and besides, she doesn’t wish for Terren’s older brother (who participated in the abuse that so shaped Terren) to take the throne. Wei takes the killing poem that she wrote and transforms it into a life-saving poem, bringing Terren back from the brink of death.

It is only when Terren kills Prince Maru that Wei decides she will kill Terren after all. The choice is no longer between Terren and Maru, but between Terren and his rarely mentioned younger brother, whose fruit magic may help the starving villages.

At the end, Terren accepts his death, recognizing that his abuse has so warped him that the only solution is death.

“The world melted away entirely as I focused on the prince. I sensed his breaths calming as the moment dragged on, saw his expression becoming more peaceful under the wind-stirrings of his damp hair. He kissed me tentatively at first. Then he found his courage after all and kissed me harder, blood and salt. And maybe he was laughing a little, I didn’t know. All I knew was that the moment he closed his eyes was when I stabbed him in the heart.”

Although, in a way, the book posits, did Terren truly die with the abuse of the little boy he was? When Wei visits the brothel where Terren was abused, she finds his ghost as a child and remarks that she’s never before seen the ghost of someone living. Nauseatingly, the child ghost reappears happy and content at the end of the novel, when Wei is burying Terren. In The Poet Empress, abuse either leaves one fundamentally unchanged (Wei) or twists one so terribly that death is preferable (Terren).

The Poet Empress is not a romance novel with its requisite HEA, but it is a love story focused on humanizing a violent, abusive man. Perhaps the intent was to make a commentary on recent romantasy novels that do give their abusive men HEAs, but I do not find The Poet Empress successful in any repudiation of this trend. Its central concerns stll focus on the abuser: What about his trauma? What about his humanity? These questions are stale, and so often used to redirect focus away from the abuser’s victims.

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Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 01:01:01 GMT

Posted by: renay

A collection of thoughts about Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman:

This is a literary science fiction novel. The science fictional part of the story is the stage and set dressing to the intimate portrait of a trans couple, their trans child, and how their trans child comes to know them through the things they leave behind.

Our present-day oligarchs likely dream about creating a space for themselves where they have eternal power and can live forever and control the communities they’ve built for themselves into perpetuity. Notes from a Regicide takes that very science fictional concept and builds their city from which they rule their tiny fiefdom, timeless. Fellman then shows that their perfect dream is, in fact, just another pretty lie. Nothing lasts forever, even with mysterious technology to prolong life in fits and starts. All people, eventually, yearn for freedom. “Oligarchs suck!” — Notes from a Regicide, probably, if books could talk.

The novel flings us into the future and forces us to think about the inevitable march of time. It’s not a novel about climate change, except for the lived reality of our characters in their present day and how they move through a changed environment. It invites the reader, should they want, to think about rising sea levels; what art will be remembered and what will be lost; what technology will be able to accomplish after not just a climate disaster but also a technological loss.

This isn’t a romance except for all the ways that it is. It’s an "ever after", with the happily in the margins of a life well-lived, and the inescapable end that comes for us all. The love between these characters is complicated and fraught, revelatory and surprising. Notes from a Regicide shows us how love is the brightest burning revolution of all.

New York City itself feels like a character with the way its past, culture, and the art made from its ancient bones pepper the narrative. Art, it could be argued, that changes countless lives. In this story, we get to meet three of them. I loved that New York City, even in the ravages of disasters and hundreds of years—thousands—retains its name and its ability to be a place of dramatic, inevitable change.

This is a trans story, but I am not trans. I’m sure I missed things. This book, for all it’s a story of a man looking back at the lives of his parents, is one about the joy of finding how you fit, where you fit, and being able to uncover those layers among others who see who you are at the core. In our current moment, that joy—triumphantly trans—is in itself revolutionary.

The writing is both lush and crisp. In the audiobook, it sounds like poetry. Sometimes, I would reread passages aloud for the pleasure of hearing the flow of them. It’s a book that rewards spending the time it takes to savor the phrasing and the way characters interact with each other.

I loved it and I did put it on my Hugo ballot because I want more people to find it, even if they end up complaining it’s not SF enough. A far-future revolution to take down technologically oppressive rulers that trans artists struggling with Life accidentally wander into due to crushing love and adoration, told in excerpts from journals compiled by the son of those trans artists? That’s SF and I’ll fight anyone who says different.

Other thoughts:
Roseanna Pendlebury @ Nerds of a Feather
Amy Nagopaleen @ Strange Horizons
Narrated Podcast
Jake Casella Brookins @ Locus
Marion Deeds @ FanLit
Marlene Harris @ Reading Reality
Alexandra Pierce @ Randomly Yours, Alex

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Sidetracks - March 9, 2026

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 18:32:50 GMT

Posted by: helloladies

Sidetracks is a collaborative project featuring various essays, videos, reviews, or other Internet content that we want to share. 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. Last week, I dropped Issue #43 of Intergalactic Mixtape. While I was building it, one of my group chats was reflecting on the way the book blog community used to move and I was reminded of when we used to do book reviews and discussions and then link to other people reviewing the same book at the end, so people could get different perspectives. Then I thought about the fact that I've been reading book reviews for years but haven't been reviewing myself, and my strong desire for that section to be in IGMX. I missed the old days more than I realized.

2. There's a short interview with Cat Sebastian about her new book, Star Shipped, which I am very excited to read.

3. My Youtube soap opera recently posted a compilation of the shorts, which she normally does to collect a whole storyline together. The show lightened up a little, but now we're back in peak drama and emotional turmoil, with wedding dress drama and the continuation of pregnancy loss grief. I continue to be sat for the ongoing matriarch drama. How many no contacts from her children will she collect this year?

4. On Joy and Resistance:

"That there have been two high-profile examples of this kind of radicalizing joy on the largest possible stages in less than a month feels like a balm for the relentless shit we have been living under as ICE has destroyed our communities. It is a reminder that even right now, even as the fight rages on, there is time for joy, there is time for art, there is time to celebrate difference and self, and to insist that you too can be free.

Because they want you to forget that."

5. With the above essay, every time I revisit it I go watch Liu's performance again. It's so invigorating.

6. There are two bids for the 2028 Worldcon; Brisbane and Nuremberg. I won't be able to go to either (sob), but I do want to make it a habit to vote in site selection. I have a few friends who are advocating for Brisbane, after COVID left the last Worldcon in that part of the world stuck online-only. I haven't decided yet, but I'll definitely be doing more research into the bid reports.

7. Please watch this Steerswoman vid.

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Sidetracks - February 9, 2026

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 19:37:31 GMT

Posted by: helloladies

Sidetracks is a collaborative project featuring various essays, videos, reviews, or other Internet content that we want to share. 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.

Anna

1. I enjoyed this episode of the podcast Lingthusiasm about prototype theory. You can listen here or read the transcript here (I read the transcript). If you have strong feelings about what is and isn’t a sandwich this episode will help you understand why!

Renay

2. Issue #39 of Intergalactic Mixtape is out. I have big dreams for the newsletter this year. But even without those, I'm still surprised, over and over again, how happy putting the issues together makes me. I guess I will always be a reccer at heart.

3. I follow Nathan, who I discovered on TikTok, for his wide range of nonfiction reads. I learn about books that I would have never discovered. He compiled his favorites from last year; if you like nonfiction, get your TBR app open and ready.

4. While several of my pals are like "WOMEN'S HOCKEY!" (but more subtle) and I'm curious how long I will resist either women's OR men's, I do feel for the newbies looking to get into the NHL. Ngozi Ukazu wrote about the struggle for people who come to the sport from a fandom angle.

5. KJ Charles will be writing a craft book on romance and I need all cis straight men writing side romances in their fantasy/science fiction books to buy a reference copy, a package of fun highlighters, and some page notes as soon as it drops.

6. The world feels very dark and tiring right now and it's easy to get panicked and overwhelmed. I'm very picky about who I listen to for political commentary because of that. One person I like a lot is Jamelle Bouie. I recently listened to his video on the Insurrection Act (Youtube) and it was a nice refresher. I repeat his reminder to myself a lot: everyone in the country, even regular, un-elected people, have political agency. Politics continues even when we lose, and the idea that we're doomed is complying in advance. So! Anyone yelling/acting urgently at me = immediate unfollow. My mental health can't take any additional panic/fear.

7. This website lets you draw a little flower for a garden, and see the gallery of flowers that have come before.

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Golden Poppy Book Awards 2025: Octavia E. Butler Award

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 04:28:44 GMT

Posted by: renay

This week I learned about the Golden Poppy Award! I'd never heard of it before.

The California Independent Booksellers Alliance (CALIBA) presents the 2025 Golden Poppy Awards in recognition of the most distinguished books written and illustrated by creators who have made California their home.

There's tons of categories, I made a direct dash to the Octavia E. Butler Award for science fiction, fantasy, and horror.

Winner: Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz
Kill the Beast by Serra Swift
The Knight and the Moth by Rachel Gillig
Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman
Red City by Marie Lu

I dug into the Intergalactic Mixtape archives to see what reviewers were saying about these books, because this is one of my most favorite nerdy things to do. I had reviews for Automatic Noodle, The Night and the Moth, Notes from a Regicide, and Red City. Alas, I had none for Kill the Beast, which is interesting because it came out in October, after I had expanded my review sources. But! The mixtape is still a baby.

If you like reading multiple opinions of books, this may interest you!

"There’s something timely about a novella in which the major plot line is a campaign of 'coordinated inauthentic activity' against members of marginalized communities who have the temerity to eke out a modicum of success." — Unofficial Hugo Book Club

"However, I’d like to think that coziness can be achieved without blunting the edges of what should be high stakes: war, enslavement, debt, bigotry, and climate change, to name a few of the topics that are explicitly mentioned in the story." — Misha Grifka Wander @ Ancillary Review of Books

Send Noodles — Unofficial Hugo Book Club
Automatic Emotions: Review of Annalee Newitz’s Automatic Noodle — Misha Grifka Wander @ Ancillary Review of Books
Very Quick Review: AUTOMATIC NOODLE by Annalee Newitz (Tordotcom) — Civilian Reader
319: Automatic Noodle — Narrated Podcast
Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz — Womble @ Runalong the Shelves
Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz — Review by Gary K. Wolfe in Locus
Review: Automatic Noodle — Bonnie @ Red Headed Femme
Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz Finds Joy, Community, and Good Food in the Future — Martin Cahill @ Reactor
Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz — Nileena Sunil @ Strange Horizons
Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz — Fiction Fans Podcast
Review of Automatic Noodle — Andrea Valeiras Fernández @ SFRA Review

"This book has some fantastic main characters. I think Sybil is an incredibly compelling main character. I loved her journey of growth and learning to stand on her own and find her own strength." — Samantha @ ladybug.books

"I felt like these two came together because it was following the vibes of a romance plot rather than because it worked naturally: though it had the beats for a good hatred-to-love arc, it was missing the heart." — Kristen @ Fantasy Cafe

The Knight and the Moth - A Must Read Fantastical Romance — Samantha @ ladybug.books
Review of The Knight and the Moth by Rachel Gillig — Kristen @ Fantasy Cafe
The Knight and the Moth by Rachel Gillig (BOOK REVIEW) — Cat Treadwell @ The Fantasy Hive
Could Have Been a Standalone: Rachel Gillig – The Knight and the Moth — Dina @ SFF Book Reviews
Reviewing The Knight and the Moth by Rachel Gillig — Bailey @ greekchoir

"I do not think I have ever read anything that captured the idiosyncracy, the mundanity and the marvel, of love like Notes from a Regicide does. It is a love story, of a child to parents, of a man to his wife, and of a whole family, each for each other and themselves. It captures a love that includes the flaws, the boredom and the habit, the mysteries." — Roseanna @ Nerds of a Feather

"Notes is thoroughly trans, saturated with transness; but, like love, transition doesn’t cure all ills for Fellman’s characters. What it does do is allow the imperfect and necessary love that is the backbone of the book’s story to exist." — Amy Nagopaleen @ Strange Horizons

Book Review: Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman — Roseanna @ Nerds of a Feather
Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman — Amy Nagopaleen @ Strange Horizons
324: Notes from a Regicide — Narrated Podcast

"Mixing familiar tropes from crime fiction, magical boarding school-set fantasy, Lu’s first adult novel is a dual chosen one narrative full of seemingly impossible choices, morally gray characters, and uncomfortably real consequences that never privilege either of its leads over the other." — Lacy Baugher Milas @ Paste (RIP)

" Red City is a good read; a book that begins with secret academia and then draws you in to a life of wealth and vice created by magic, with characters that are nuanced and a setting that works on the whole." — Mark Yon @ SFF World

Marie Lu Confidently Steps Out of the YA World with Harrowing, Emotionally Complex Fantasy Red City — Lacy Baugher Milas @ Paste (RIP)
Red City by Marie Lu — Mark Yon @ SFF World
Red City is a perfect 10/10 — Tori @ torinthatnerd
Red City by Marie Lu — Caitlin @ realmsofmymind

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Adventures Elsewhere — December 2025

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:40:01 GMT

Posted by: helloladies

Adventures Elsewhere collects our reviews, guest posts, articles, and other content we've spread across the Internet recently! See what we've been up in our other projects. :D

Anna

I posted my Fandom Trumps Hate project, an annotated bibliography on Liao textiles

I also wrote up a few reflections on my personal projects in 2025. There’s one each on sewing,writing, and media

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Let's Get Literate! 2026 Reading Goals & Challenges

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 21:28:21 GMT

Posted by: renay

It's a new reading year!

Last year, I set myself a goal of 50 books. I blew past that, with the help of re-reads. I could make a higher reading goal this year, but I have decided that 50 books is a great goal. One: it's an election year. Although I'm doing less these days for mental health reasons, I'm going to assume there will be times I need to shift focus to work and won't be able to read much. Two: 50 books allows me to make five goals in the "B" column on my 2026 goals bingo card for every ten books I read. I love an even number.

Other considerations for this year:

try to read one new-to-me book for every five rereads
try 25 new-to-me authors
25% of reading from city library
read more from small presses
catch up on the October Daye series

2026 Reading Redux

Usually with my redux challenge, I go back a year from whatever the previous year's redux challenge was for. This year should be a repeat of 2019, but it turns out I've read a lot of books published that year! I'm not quite feeling the books I haven't yet read from 2019. Instead, I decided to skip revisiting 2019 and instead catch up on my science fiction reading in 2026. I'm going to pair this with books I own and try to make a dent in my physical TBR. I have a lot to choose from!

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
I'll at least reread the trilogy before Radiant Star drops; I have the other novels set in the universe, but I'm not sure if I'll have time to get through all of them. Also, pour one out for the loss of the cool space covers for this series.

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson
I've wanted to reread this book for a minute; I caught up on episodes of Hugo, Girl! last year and their discussion of the book convinced me it was time so I found used copies of all three books (RIP mass market paperback). I've never read the sequels (I've heard mixed things), but now I will have the opportunity to mark this series off my list.

Player of Games by Iain M. Banks
Is this the right place to start with the Culture series? I don't know, but out of all the people I asked this book ended up closest to the top of most lists. I haven't felt as caught in an unexpected reading order debate (complimentary) since I tried reading The Chronicles of Narnia.

Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
It was nominated for a whole Hugo, went on to win, and I didn't read it. This is how obvious it was that I was in a massive reading slump for years. I recently scooped up a library copy at a book sale...sad to say in my library it simply did not circulate and they dumped it (SFF is not as beloved in my library).

Slow Gods by Claire North
While working on Intergalactic Mixtape last year, I kept seeing reviews of this pop up randomly. Since we're in a fantasy ascendancy at the moment, when there's a science fiction novel that sounds good and is getting solid reviews from trusted reviewers, I take notice!

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
I bought this and...never read it. But now there's about to be a fourth book, Children of Strife. Tchaikovsky is beloved so there will be discussion and I don't want to be left out. XD

Teo's Durumi by Elaine U. Cho
The sequel to Ocean's Godori ended up on my shelf because when I finished it there was space for more books, but no announcement. But then the second book dropped so I scooped up a copy so I would be prepared to read it when I felt the mood hit me. I'm very much on a "buy the sequels of books I liked so the author can finish the series" kick.

The Stardust Grail by Yume Kitasei
I liked The Deep Sky by this author, and someone said this book was good, so I scooped it up last year. Kitasei has another book out that got some good coverage, Saltcrop, which I might pick up soon, too.

Interstellar MegaChef by Lavanya Lakshminarayan
I saw the author talk about this book on Bluesky and immediately got a copy. But again, book buying and book reading: two different hobbies. But now there's a sequel, Intergalactic Feast, coming out this year, and the series itself is called Flavour Hacker. I'm charmed.

The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez
I've been saying I'm going to read this for ages. I'm going to read this in 2026 and if I don't everyone is allowed to shame me for the entirety of 2027.

Sweep of Stars by Maurice Broaddus
I picked this book up on a trip to St. Louis. I didn't even know the author had a space opera series—the last time I was aware of his work it was with an Arthurian retelling of some kind (not my bag, generally). There's a third book out in the series this year, A City Dreaming. The downside to wanting to read new science fiction: so many are sequels! I'm behind! The upside: lots of reading!

Other titles I have on my shelves I have for reading options:

The Two Lies of Faven Sythe by Megan E. O'Keefe
Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite
Cascade Failure by L.M. Sagas
These Burning Stars by Bethany Jacobs
Architects of Memory by Karen Osborne
Nophek Gloss by Essa Hansen
Fortuna by Kristyn Merbeth
The Wrong Stars by Tim Pratt

2026 Anticipated Books

Here are some books I have my eye on in 2026 and might read (my ADHD: lol).

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Let's Get Literate! 2025 Reading Recap

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 23:17:18 GMT

Posted by: renay

2025 was the first year my reading started to feel less like a miracle and more like, "oh yeah, reading! I do that without struggling." I read 78 books, although a lot of them were rereads. I'm happy to reread The Murderbot Diaries and a bunch of my favorite romance novels a few times a year. The brain craves familiarity.

I have elevenish favorites this year (I combined books in series, because I make the rules). My top book, which is no big secret as I've been shouting about it for months, is the only one ranked; the rest are here in alphabetical order.

Go Luck Yourself by Sara Raasch

This is the second book in the Romance & Royals series; the first book is The Nightmare Before Kissmas. There was too much bad-dad energy in that one for me to develop any fond feelings for it at all, but the second one, which follows the brother from the first, hit much better. These are very silly in their conceits, which masks the fact that they're about serious familial abuse issues and are potentially heart wrenching if you have any deep family feelings at all! The romance in this one, complicated and facing serious hardships, worked much better for me.

North Continent Ribbon by Ursula Whitcher

In a year where generative AI came to the forefront of creative discussion, it was fascinating to read this book, about Nakharat, where there's a different type of artificial intelligence at play. This is a series of interconnected short fiction, jumping forward through time and social change on the planet. I haven't read enough mosaic books to know how well this one holds up as an example of the form, but once I found my footing I was hooked. The last story in particular was excellent. I'm very excited to see what Whitcher does next.

The Practice, the Horizons, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar

This was the first Samatar I ever read (I know) and I didn't know what to expect, but I came through loving it. The beautiful thing about this story is that it's using a familiar framework—academia and social class—to tell a story about reclaiming collective power over individualistic power. But because Samatar is so good, it becomes applicable to anyone who has ever felt trapped in a sick system. It feels very much like a fable, part of a story being passed down.

Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark

I read Ring Shout because it was on a reading challenge list I made, but last year it got a (deserved) bump with the release of Sinners. People recced it all over as having similar vibes to Sinners, although Ring Shout is coming to the monster conversation from a cosmic horror angle. Ring Shout goes harder on the fantasy of it all, too, which was my favorite part. My main takeaway was "wow" and "I wish there was more of this", because Maryse has all the makings of an epic hero.

The Singing Hills Cycle by Nghi Vo

2025 was the year I finally dived into the series from Nghi Vo after friends telling me on repeat for years that it was excellent. Surprise! It's excellent. I have the whole series listed here, for completion's sake, because each entry deepens the world Vo is building. My favorites from the series are The Empress of Salt and Fortune and Mammoths at the Gate, both very different but also about changing friendships due to shifting power imbalances. I haven't read A Mouthful of Dust yet, because it just came out, but I feel confident that it will also be good. It looks like we're getting another book this year, A Long and Speaking Silence, that's more of a prequel.

Sorcery and Small Magics by Maiga Doocy

When romantasy comes up, this is the book I want to shove in everyone's hands even though it's not, technically, romantasy. Yet. It's a rivals-to-friends story, set in a magical school where the main characters are set against each other due to drastically different personalities and approaches to education. Leo acts down to the expectations people have of him and Sebastian is hyper focused due to [Plot Development]. So of course they clash, over and over, until they accidentally run into some forbidden magic and must team up to solve resolve the consequences of the spell. There are supportive friends, a creepy forest, and a helpful witch, but the focus is on these two men and how their different lives have shaped them. The creepy forest part was very effective. It's like if VanderMeer's Area X met a Studio Ghibli forest.

The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson

I had this book on my TBR for years, and then, inspired by Jenny's love for it, I slurped it up in a few days. It definitely leans more literary, with a focus on the characters rather than the technology at its core. The way it explores class and privilege was excellent, too. Although relationship between Cara and her handler, Dell, was great, the thing that has stuck with me since I read it was the deep desire for non-toxic family connections. Also, the great sub thesis: billionaires suck.

The Tainted Cup & A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett

The first and last book by this author I loved was City of Stairs, and I loved it all the way through the end where it utterly lost me. I didn't finish that series (although people told me it was good, but I take this type of betrayal seriously), and I haven't revisited this author since. I probably wouldn't have, either, except The Tainted Cup ended up on the Hugo ballot. Reluctantly, I read it! I was fully prepared to rank it under No Award if there were any more specific shenanigans. There were shenanigans, but not that bad kind, and I ended up loving the world here, the creeping horror of giant monsters that can not only destroy everything but turn people and the countryside into grotesque biological terrors with the power of their fluids. Also, I love a reluctant team up that is actually going to be great, but one party is all, "Ugh, I GUESS." about it. The sequel didn't top the first book—it felt too slow at the start—but was still a great continuation of the things I loved from the first book, with deeper character connections and the hint of growing trust between Ana and Din. There were also no specific shenanigans in the second. But I've got my eye out. Fool me once, etc.

What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher

When I was making my list for the year, I was surprised to find this book at the top of my rating scale (I use a very nerdy system with five categories, which I then add up and average to get the rating). I'm hit or miss with Kingfisher's horror, but I thought this was a delightfully creepy remix of the original "Fall of the House of Usher". The character work was excellent; if you're a fan of rogue mushrooms, I highly recommend this. There are two sequels already out (I've only read one; it didn't top the first for me), so it looks like this may become a longer running series.

The Witch Roads & The Nameless Land by Kate Elliott

Speaking of rogue mushrooms, The Witch Roads duology was a terrific epic fantasy and examination of empire across a land plagued by a sentient fog, called The Pall, filled with Spore. Spore will attach itself and turn any living body into a obscene, zombie-esque creature there's no hope to save. Elen, our protagonist, is a deputy courier, walking the empire to carry messages but also to root out Spore before it can grow out of control and erupt, turning entire towns into rampaging nightmare creatures. This is the backdrop of Elen getting caught up in the court politics of the empire at the same time that her past comes back to haunt her. Oh, and there's a actual haunt and unfortunately for Elen, he's hot (emotionally). I keep wanting someone to write an essay about how the Pall/Spore in this world is analogous to climate change/disaster, but alas, no one yet has. This specific duology is complete, but there's another book set in this world, specifically inner empire, with new characters coming in 2027.

The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson

Given how much I have shouted about this epic fantasy that came out of nowhere and knocked my socks off, it's not much of a surprise that it's my favorite book of the year. It beat out The Witch Roads by a hair because it immediately shot past "this is a five star read" to "this must be rated on the bananas scale only". It combines a peaceful transition of government power with a series of games, except whoops: one of the contenders is murdered and our main protagonist, Neema, must work to solve who did it. Also, she's not sure she didn't do it, since she and the Raven contender were not friends and she was, regrettably, drugged to the gills during said murder. Any time there's a potential direction for this story to go, it swerves another direction entirely and jumps off the cliff I didn't know was there. My favorite parts are the second chance romance and that Neema is coded to be autistic. This changes the way she interacts with the world in all the logical ways without demonizing her. She's young, ambitious, ethically rigid, sometimes deeply unlikeable, and makes terrible decisions, and I love her, your honor.

Reading Statistics

Books Read: 78
New Books: 51.3%
Rereads: 48.7%
Pages Read: 18,823
Audio Listened: 88:34:00
DNFs: 3
Fiction: 95%
Nonfiction: 5%
Longest Book: 648
Shortest Book: 100
Average Rating: 4.13
Best Reading Month: December (13)
Worst Reading Month: February (2)
Adult Books: 98.7%
Young Adult Books: 1.3%
Women Authors: 78.2%
Men Authors: 20.5%
Non-binary Authors: 1.3%
White Authors: 82.1%
Black, Indigenous, & Global Majority Authors: 17.9%

This is the first time in years that I've tracked my reading statistics. I was pretty pleased, except that, as I feared, my habit of falling back into rereading and being in a reading slump has meant reading mostly white authors! Bad habits have returned! I'm going to improve this for 2026. Hilariously, I can probably manage it with all the books I've purchased, but not read (because buying books and reading books are two different hobbies).

One of the things I wanted to do last year was start looking at the origin of what I was reading. This came up anew after Tor kept sweeping award categories, and since awards are the primary place I get book recommendations, I'd like to be aware of how bad the damage is. I tried to split things by publisher and imprint. I did my best, but there's probably some miscategorization still.

Publishers & Imprints

Macmillan, predictably, makes up 38.5% of all my reading because they're doing The Most. RBMedia, the next largest, is the publisher for the The Murderbot Diaries audiobooks. My goal this year isn't so much to get the Macmillan number down—hard to do when you read for awards when Macmillan dominates—but to get other numbers up. Also: increase small press publishers!

When we break the big Macmillan number down, the bulk of my reading is definitely Tor Books and Tordotcom. I thought Orbit would be higher but it turns out, that only works if you read the books you buy from an imprint. :D

Reading Structure

I didn't think I had become as much of a digital reader, but my stats this year prove me wrong! My audiobook reading is all digital via the library or libro.fm.

Digging further into the data, I didn't do too bad using physical material at my city library. 24.4% is good! In 2026, though, I plan to double down on using my city library. After serving on my Friends of the Library board and seeing how expensive the ebooks/audiobooks are, I want to use physical media as much as possible to take some stress off their licenses.

My secondary library is a shared login from a pal with access to a massive library network. It makes my library's digital access look like a gnat, even thought I have state-wide consortium access. I don't feel bad about using their licenses, because unlike my city, their library hasn't been defunded (yet...it's wild out there).

I also want to get books I own (the personal library category) higher than 19.2%. I'm shamed. >.>

The one little slice that has no label is for paper ARCs. I don't get many of those unless I request them and this year I read one, for a whopping 1.3% of my total.

That's a wrap on 2025! If you read any of my favorites and have readalikes, I'm always hyped for recs. If you wrote a favorites post for your SFF reading, I'd love to see it (and then link it in Intergalactic Mixtape, haha).

comments

Winds in the East...Mist Coming In... (Hugo Season Approaches)

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 05:40:20 GMT

Posted by: renay

It's almost nomination time for the Hugo Awards! As someone invested in recommendations as a type of critique/conversation, I'm thriving.

Worldcon in 2026 will be in LA. If you'd like to nominate for the 2026 Hugo Award, you can do so by being a member of the Seattle Worldcon or purchasing at least a WSFS membership from LAcon V. There's a medium-length guide here on the whole process. Nomination is step one: Seattle and LA WSFS members build the short lists as a collective.

However! Even if you don't plan to become a member (the membership fee is $50 and times are hard), everyone can share the things they would nominate if they could via the Hugo Spreadsheet of Doom, or make their own lists and post them on socials with the #HugoAward tag. Lots of people (it's me; I'm people) have gaps on their nomination forms and are looking for cool stuff to check out. Consider making a rec list/thread!

A disclaimer: the following are my personal nominations that I'll submit next year, not official Hugo finalists. I know the nominations/finalist language can be confusing.

Written Fiction Categories

I do last minute panic reading starting in November. As of writing this I am still reading for 2025 and will be up until January 30, 2026. I'm also bad at reading short fiction outside novellas before the end of the year (do not...ask how long my list is). I do have two novels for sure!

The Witch Roads by Kate Elliott (Tor Books) — Novel
This is the first in a duology which I loved; the sequel is also out so the series is complete. It's very classic fantasy, and Elliott's love of storytelling, world building, and intriguing love interests (Andevai walked so Sara'ala could run) come through strongly. I reviewed The Witch Roads back in June, and since then I've grown more fond of it. Sometimes what you want is a road trip, some dubious-consent possession, clever women, court intrigue, and small stakes adventure where the goal isn't to solve the sentient zombie mushroom plague, but instead survive so you can go home to the life you spent years building for yourself.

The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson (Orbit) — Novel
I read the entire book in three days via the library and had a book hangover for a week. I then bought two copies (one trade, one Illumicrate special edition). It's a fantasy novel written by someone who loves Dramatic Mess. It takes a now common conceit—playing a series of games in order to choose a leader—and muddles it up with a murder mystery and layers upon layers of political intrigue and family drama. Is it doing The Most? Absolutely. Is it The Best? It's a yes from me, but we will have to wait for the voters. In these times of Horrors, sometimes a fun romp is the best thing for our mental health.

edited to add 3/18:

Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman (Tor) - Novel
This was a senitent poem that turned itself into a literary science fiction novel about a far future world where a trans man tries to understand his trans parents by reaching back into their past via his father's writing. The science fiction underpins a family saga and a story about how art can shape the world and I loved it.

Best Dramatic Presentation

Sinners — Long Form
I'm not into vampire stuff until I am into vampire stuff. I can never predict when this will happen, and it hardly ever happens with mainstream material. I was excited for Sinners, but it could have gone either way, and the way it went was: I loved it.

KPop Demon Hunters — Long Form
Why, yes, I will be joining the masses to nominate this. I'm not sorry about it, either. I think EJAE, Audrey Nuna, and Rei Ami deserve a Hugo Award nomination to go with their Grammy nomination.

Weapons — Long Form
The marketing got me. However! I went in expecting a straight horror movie, but I came out the other side pleasantly surprised. I do think it's better to go into the film knowing as little as possible, and this isn't a review so I don't want to spoil anything. I had a great time and have continued to think about the film in the months since.

Murderbot, Season 1 — Long Form
Over on the Hugo rec sheet, the three episodes getting the most attention are "FreeCommerce", "Eye Contact" (heeeeey, shippers), and "All Systems Red". I know it's hard for seasons to compete in long form, but that's where I'll be putting it because for me the whole thing works better as a miniseries than discrete episodes. If I were going to nominate an individual episode (I haven't decided), it would be "Escape Velocity Protocol", because of Sanctuary Moon.

Severance, Season 2 — Long Form
Again, this is one of those situations where the whole thing is a perfect capsule. There were episodes in the first season I thought worked well as specific stories, but in season two it all feels more interconnected as we learn more about the characters. If I had to nominate a single episode, it would be either "Sweet Vitriol" or "Cold Harbor".

The field this year is tough. There's The Last of Us, Andor, Superman, plus whatever other superhero movies came out. I still want to see a few films, too: Predator: Badlands (the interviews with the actors got me) and Mickey 17, specifically. Yes, I know my ballot is already full in this category (and several others) and I would have to dump something I already want to nominate. Yes, it's causing me agony. D:

Anyway, the Hugo is a club-run popular award, so I suspect the long form ballot will look pretty film heavy unless us Murderbot, Severance, and Andor fans (I am not yet one of you but wish you the best) band together!

Fan Categories

The fiction/media categories take up the most oxygen in the Hugo Awards. It's normal! Writers are treasures that give us our tasty treats. But my favorite categories right now are the fan categories.

This year, I decided to challenge myself to think more deeply about my fan nominations. I've been reading/watching/listening more widely thanks to Intergalactic Mixtape, so I have a bigger base of potential nominations to pull from. I decided to focus on projects and writers who have received two or fewer nominations since 2019 (to try and account for the weirdness of 2020 and, ugh, 2023) that are doing work I like. Some may notice there are more than five items in some categories! That is because I will only decide which five I'm going to choose a week before the deadline. I still want to talk about all these projects! I agonize over this every year, because fan communities are still kicking.

Fancast

Stitch & Bitch — Fancast
This is the SFF, crafting, and reading live show of Diana, Kelsey, Rachel, Reija, and Bree. Each month they get together and discuss what they're crafting (lots of different fiber projects), what's been going on in SFF fandom, books they've been reading, awards they're watching, and other media they like. I love it because it often operates as a chill hangout podcast I can put on while doing other things. Sadly, this is often not crafting. It's more like: laundry and dishes. But it makes those tasks more bearable! Stitch & Bitch has never been nominated for the fancast category. Example episode: October 2025.

My Name is Marines — Fancast
I really like the way she invites people to think about narrative structure, what it means for a book to "work", and critique in general. Our tastes sometimes align, but it's very interesting when they don't (I learn a lot, even if we disagree). Multiple times she's saved my bacon on reading a title I was looking forward to before she revealed it was a package of "Oops, All Racism!" that white reviewers I follow missed. Marines has never been nominated for the fancast category. Example episodes: Sunrise on the Reaping; escapism is dead; climate fiction recs; Dungeon Crawler Carl; Katabasis; "is everything fan fiction?", everyone HATES a negative review

A Meal of Thorns — Fancast
A Meal of Thorns is part of the Ancillary Review of Books Cinematic Universe, produced and hosted by Jake Casella Brookins and a rotating cast of contributors. It's a critical podcast, digging deep into the books and topics it discusses. It's also very well-produced! I love a pod that cares about sound. A Meal of Thorns has been nominated for the fancast category once. Example episodes: The Fifth Season; Seattle Worldcon wrap up; Hugo novels and novellas with Roseanna.

Bailey/greekchoir — Fancast
The great thing about the TikTok algorithm is that eventually it will learn your tastes and deposit you on the shores of an island built by someone who loves books and stories in a way that resonates with you. Bailey works for Macmillan, so she always has an interesting perspective on publishing in general and specific genres in particular. Bailey has never been nominated for the fancast category. Example episodes: Hugo talk (Hugo voter call out); low fantasy recs; The Raven Scholar; The Tainted Cup; Severance and media literacy; this video of SFF heist novels.

Narrated Podcast — Fancast
Over the years I've become a staunch advocate for audiobooks and increased accessibility, so it's really nice to have a podcast that covers lots of genre titles as audiobooks first and audiobook culture. Narrated has never been nominated for the fancast category. Example episodes: The Tomb of Dragons & Short Fiction Spotlight, A Drop of Corruption, Notes from a Regicide, The Shattering Peace, Novellavember 2025, The Raven Scholar

Critical Friends — Fancast
Strange Horizons is an important lodestar for the online SFF community, and in 2022 Critical Friends, a criticism podcast, launched. It's different than other podcasts that have a more regular release schedule, but in 2025 so far we've gotten an entire five episodes (good critique takes time)! Critical Friends has never been nominated for the fancast category. Example episodes: SFF in Translation, On Time-Pass, Length and Breadth, and On Imagining Hopefully

Tori Morrow — Fancast
Tori is someone I discovered on BookTok, and then made my way to her Youtube. She covers a lot of science fiction I wouldn't have known existed. I've also gotten so many recommendations from her for books I might have never picked up because I didn't think they would be up my alley, when in fact, they were! Also, listening to her videos is so relaxing; she's has a very steady, deliberate style I appreciate a lot. Tori has never been nominated for the fancast category. Example episodes: You Need to Read The Daevabad Trilogy, 2025 Releases So Far | The Good, the Bad, and the Meh, Reacting to the 2025 Fantasy & Sci-fi Goodreads Choice Awards Nominees, Red City, A Song of Legends Lost

Lexi/newlynova — Fancast
Lexi's approach to critique is very fun and I always have a great time when watching her videos. There's a lot to be said for a critic that a) makes you laugh, b) loves using charts, and c) decides going bowling to choose a reading list would be fun. Lexi has never been nominated for the fancast category. Example episodes: katabasis, r.f. kuang, and modern dark academia, bowling to determine what i read this summer, and book recs for (almost) every genre

Sword & Laser — Fancast
Sword & Laser is one of the longest running SFF podcasts out there. They do a book club, genre discussion, and talk about SFF news. One of the benefits of the long running podcast like this is you get a good sense of their reading and narrative preferences, and it becomes a great way to find (or to avoid) books. Sword & Laser was nominated once in 2018. Example episodes: New Achievement!, A New Theseus, The Details in the Devils, She Who Became Herstory, Punchin' Shrimp and Grits

Overinvested — Fancast
This is a film criticism podcast that includes genre, and for that they are my favorite general film podcast. Our tastes don't always align on the genre films they cover, but I like that a lot because it helps me think more deeply about the film I love they don't and vice versa. I'm not into film, the language of films, and its history like the hosts of this show, so it's always a fun and educational time. Overinvested has never been nominated for the fancast category. Example episodes: KPop Demon Hunters, Sinners, Superman (2025), 28 Years Later, Mickey 17.

Fanzine

I have a lot of emotional attachment to Fanzine because it's where I won both my Hugo Awards (no, it never gets less weird to say). In the age of short form video and other non-writing projects (longer Youtube videos, podcasts, etc.) that don't come with built-in transcripts, I value writing about SFF more than ever. There are so many fans doing terrific work writing about SFF and fandom and the ~experience~ of SFF they're reading/watching.

Fantasy Cafe — Fanzine
Kristen has been running Fantasy Cafe for years, reliably churning out reviews. She's an old school SFF book blogger (we're like unicorns). One lovely event she hosts every year (also eligible for Best Related Work as a project) is Women in SF&F Month, where she organizes women writers to talk about their books and their experiences in writing. This is a long running project, so the archives are a deep resource I'm not sure many people realize exists! Fantasy Cafe has never been nominated in the fanzine category.

Speculative Fiction in Translation — Fanzine
Probably the most niche blog on my list, Rachel has been writing about speculative fiction in translation for ten years. Science fiction and fantasy are mainstream, but translated SFF fiction has a harder time breaking through in U.S. markets (because us Americans are culturally isolated). The internet helped a lot, but there are still discoverability issues that Rachel has worked hard to address in her coverage. It's a true labor of love. Speculative Fiction in Translation has never been nominated in the fanzine category.

The Rec Center — Fanzine
There have been times in our ongoing Hellscape where opening The Rec Center was the only bright spot of my week, so I am very biased. Both a meticulously organized fan work rec engine and a newsletter about fan- and pop culture, The Rec Center always feels to me like the best parts of fandom before capitalism got its claws into it. It's always fun, often teaching readers about a cool niche topic, and a great way to discover new fandoms/writers. The Rec Center has been nominated once in the fanzine category.

SFF Book Reviews — Fanzine
Dina's been reviewing and talking about SFF for years and years and she talks about the Hugos often! That's normally excellent bait for us nominating navel gazers (I say this with love). Between The State of SFF column and her regular review schedule, her blog is a worthy addition to your regular SFF blog reading. SFF Book Reviews has never been nominated in the fanzine category.

Transfer Orbit — Fanzine
I remember SF Signal very fondly; may John DeNardo and JP Frantz always have a cool pillow and the hot beverage of their choice available at all times. But I think of Transfer Orbit as a spiritual successor to SF Signal, even though they're vastly different. Andrew Liptak's approach to writing about SFF and sharing SFF news departs drastically from the coverage style of SF Signal. It's just a vibe I get. There are in-depth reviews, news commentary (often with bonus contextualization), book lists, and starting this year, the Table of Contents feature, where the TOCs of genre magazines are collected in one place. He also adds links as they become available! It's an exceptional service. Transfer Orbit has never been nominated for the fanzine category.

Runalong the Shelves — Fanzine
Out in the wilds of the UK, there's a book tempter. He looks innocent, but if you look away from him, when you look back at your TBR list, it's going to have ten new books on it. I have fallen prey to him...many times. Anyway, Runalong the Shelves is very much what I think of when I think of a blog run by a fan who wants to drag everyone ~~to hell~~ to the bookstore with him. Runalong the Shelves has never been nominated in the fanzine category.

Ancillary Review of Books — Fanzine
In culture (general) it feels like we're on a swing away from critical engagement in media (it's the fascism, boss). From accusations of "it's not that deep" to any critical review to book review sections in professional websites and magazines being slowly dismantled, it feels dire out there. But the folks at Ancillary Review of Books were like, "Nah, bro." and kept plugging away at a thing they loved doing and inviting people along for their analytical journey. From the great contributor columns, a great companion podcast (mentioned above), and regular rec lists for critical engagement, Ancillary Review of Books is doing great work. Ancillary Review of Books has been nominated once in the fanzine category.

Semiprozine Bonus

Fansplaining — Semiprozine
For years, Fansplaining was a great podcast about fan culture and also the ways that fan culture interacted (whether for good or ill) with mainstream culture. Now, with the departure of one of the hosts and a podcast hiatus, they're doing more essay publications about fan and fandom related content, which means they're eligible in the (incredibly competitive) Semiprozine category. Once I realized they were professionally paying their essay contributors (I did not know this), I realized I would have to move them out of Fanzine, but they're still a Fanzine in my heart.

Fan Writer

This is the Fraught category, where even if I could nominate twenty people it wouldn't be enough. Lots of these folks write for professional publications, but they also do a lot of their own fan writing across multiple sites. But in the end, no one is maxing out their Roth IRA on fan writing, so I don't really take that into account for this category. :P

Roseanna Pendlebury — Fan Writer
Sometimes I think about what if Roseanna never joined Nerds of a Feather (how I discovered her). What a loss for me, specifically. Our tastes are so different, but I love the way she writes about SFF and storytelling in general. This year she did really cool essays, like A Path Through the Landscape: My Own Route Through Science Fiction, A Path Through the Landscape: A Journey Into Fantasy, and her close reading of Lord of the Rings. In addition to being an editor at Nerds of a Feather, she writes a novella column, Small Press Dispatch, for Ancillary Review of Books and sporadically reviews for Strange Horizons. She may be doing other things, too, that I have not yet discovered! She's prolific! Roseanna has been nominated in the fan writer category once.

Alex Brown — Fan Writer
Alex is the reviewer/critic that introduces me to the most work I would never otherwise hear about. They write in professional publications like Reactor and Locus, but also do their own thing at their blog. My favorite work from them this year was a deep dive into episodes of Murderbot, which gave me a lot to think about as someone who doesn't know a lot about TV/film (there doesn't seem to be a category for this, but look for episode recaps by Alex Brown). Alex has been nominated in the fan writer category once.

Gautam Bhatia — Fan Writer
Bhatia is the current co-ordinating editor of Strange Horizons and a published author (The Sentence is published in India, but won't be out in the U.S. until 2027 as The Fifth Inflection). But his newsletter, Words for Worlds, has a prominent fannish vibe, and he's bringing a really specific perspective that only people that straddle the line between pro/fan with a recognition of the disparity of power between those roles can manage. Gautam Bhatia has never been nominated in the fan writer category.

Jenny Hamilton — Fan Writer
There are memes that go around from time to time, asking, "what would you do with a billion dollars?" I would provide Jenny a three million dollar endowment to sit at home and do nothing but read books and write hilarious commentary about them and the Culture of Books/Reading. Topic restrictions? Hell no. How else would we get essays like The Value of Criticism Is Thinking Together, With the Serial Numbers Filed Off: The Problem with Trad Pub Fanfic, I Finally Figured Out the Problem: Angel Hates Sex, or that one time she wrote an SFF rec list based on a Babysitters Club Super Special. She reviews for Reactor and Strange Horizons, too. She's brilliant, creative, and has a depth of knowledge about books you only find in the most intimidating and talented librarians wearing the most iconic glasses chain you've ever seen in your life. Jenny has never been nominated in the fan writer category.

Arturo Serrano — Fan Writer
One of the great things that Nerds of a Feather has done over their long existence in SFF fandom has been opening the doors to writers I would never have discovered on my own due to *gestures to our social media algorithmic hellscape*. I follow his TV/film reviews closely because our interests often overlap. This year was no different; Arturo did a lot of writing about science fiction and fantasy media that's looking at it from outside a U.S. perspective (which I need more of in my life). Arturo has never been nominated in the fan writer category.

Fan Artist

Fan Artist is a weird category. The rules description says:

An artist or cartoonist whose work has appeared through publication in semiprozines or fanzines or through other public, non-professional, display (including at a convention or conventions, posting on the internet, in online or print-on-demand shops, or in another setting not requiring a fee to see the image in full-resolution) during the previous calendar year.

The WSFS nominating body tends to be liberal with what they consider "art", though; for example, people in SFF fandom who make jewelry used to be regularly nominated and still make the long list to this day.

The most common problem I run into is that the people eligible for this award see the "Fan Artist" label as something different than how the WSFS means it. It carries the, "I'm an amateur!" vibe outside the WSFS, but inside all it means is that someone's SFF art is publicly available and the amount of pieces needed is lower. I understand why professionals would shy away from such a label, even if the pro category is tougher. For that, an artist needs at least three pieces in a professional publication (and the definition of pro pub is weird and opaque), and timing-wise it's hard to know when an art piece was published versus when the artist shares it.

Sometimes I wonder if we could collapse the pro/art artist categories, raise the number of pieces, and remove the money requirements. Digital art and the internet have changed so much, the professional/fan divide is so porous, and the amount of content so vast that it becomes hard for the nominating body to collectively make a decision. I'm not an artist, though! And that can of worms will be up to the artists.

Over the last ten years, Fan Artist has had huge spread. There's approximately 80 people between the finalist and long list individuals. Art is really subjective! But I've also been collecting artists I love all year long for my newsletter, so lo, I do have a short list.

Disclaimer: it's very possible all these artists are absolutely eligible in Pro Artist. But again, that pesky professional publication rule rears its confusing head and I'm just not equipped for the sleuthing necessary this year.

Geneva Bowers — Fan Artist
Geneva won Best Fan Artist once in 2018; that's how I discovered her work! It was so beautiful and I have followed her since. She's continued to do amazing art work in the years since; all of her art is so cheerful and stylish. The pieces I'm thinking of this year: the Sailor Senshi series, where she wrapped up the Inner Senshi set. Geneva has been nominated (and won) for the fan artist category once.

Devin Elle Kurtz — Fan Artist
I've been following Devin for awhile and I'm so happy to see her be so successful. I'm specifically nominating her for this fantastic KPop Demon Hunters piece, which calls back to My Neighbor Totoro. It's a great example of fan art! Devin is also the artist of the eye-catching, heartwarming Bakery Dragon picture book series, which may also make her eligible in Best Professional Artist, but again, the rules on this are ???? to me. Devin has never been nominated in the fan artist category.

Yuumei — Fan Artist
Yuumei is another artist I've followed for a long time; this year she also made some incredible KPop Demon Hunters fanart, but her fantasy artwork in general is sensational. I recently ordered some prints I've had my eye on and can confirm the art is just as striking in person! Yunmei has never been nominated in the fan artist category.

Dominique Ramsey — Fan Artist
Dominique's art is so vibrant and dramatic that the first time I saw her work I immediately bookmarked multiple prints I wanted to put on my walls. Her lines and colors are beautiful and I love all the ways she imagines animals. I've linked to her art tag on Tumblr, but she has a fanart section on her website to browse, full of excellent work. Dominique has never been nominated in the fan artist category.

Other Categories

There are 18 regular Hugo Award categories (soon to be 19 if the Poetry category passes at the Business meeting next year), plus the Astounding and the Lodestar. I know some people take participating in each category very seriously, but I have freed myself from the trap of Completion. Some years I'm going to have time and some years I won't! The best I can do each year is care about the categories that matter to me and share my expertise, trust that other category fans will do the same and I can rely on their recommendations, and together we'll build a collective finalist list that gets as close as possible to Big Nerd Consensus.

(And then we'll all argue about it for a few months.)

Here's a list of things on reading/initial ballot list.

The Complete Astreiant by Melissa Scott and Lisa A. Barnett (Best Series)
The Legendborn Cycle by Tracy Deonn (Best Series)
The Cemeteries of Amalo by Katherine Addison (Best Series)
Speculative Insight: 2025 edited by Alexandra Pierce (Best Related Work)
We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories About Political Protest, Resistance, and Hope edited by Annalee Newitz, Malka Older, & Karen Lord (Best Related Work)
Women in SF&F month edited by Kristen from Fantasy Cafe (Best Related Work)
Blue Prince (Best Game/Interactive Work)
Magic the Gathering - Final Fantasy (Best Game/Interactive Work)

Other Hugo Awards Rec Lists

There are eligibility lists flying all over the place; A.C. Wise is collecting them and it's a great resource. I'm looking specifically for rec lists of art and writing by other people! If you have one, let me know. :)

Open Discussion — What's worth considering for the ballot in 2026? - Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog

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The Nameless Land by Kate Elliott

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 06:17:45 GMT

Posted by: renay

I'm pretty stoked that I finished a series I started the same year I started it. Don't look at the fact it's only two books. It still counts, okay!?

Earlier this year, Kate Elliott released The Witch Roads, a secondary world fantasy adventure. It follows Elen, a deputy courier who travels around her region carrying messages for the empire. She also kills Spore hiding in the countryside. Spore are evil mushrooms that will turn anything they touch into a twisted, zombie nightmare. Oh, as a bonus, Spore is also sentient. Equally as evil is the banality of bureaucracy and rigid class structures the empire uses to maintain order. Elen gets thrust into a classism nightmare when she makes a desperate play to escape her past by guiding a spoiled prince and his retinue north on a mysterious errand. I read and reviewed it a few weeks ago. The second book in the duology is out now!

The Nameless Land picks up where The Witch Roads dropped us off—a remote garrison on the edge of the empire. The first book was firmly rooted in the social and political realities of the Tranquil Empire and its mysterious past. The journey Elen takes the prince on is an exploratory world building and characterization road trip. But every step forward into the north that Elen takes cracks open the empire's facade.

The Witch Roads is deliberate about the commentary it's making about empire, the organization of society, and who gets to have power. It's easy to read the first book and go, "well, the Tranquil Empire is rotten to the core in the expected ways! What else is new re: empire?" At the end of The Witch Roads, Elen's own experience draws a line underneath why she finds life bearable in such a restrictive, disrespectful, hierarchical place.

It could be so much worse.

The Nameless Land is a continuation of the road trip theme through a new political landscape. Time seems to collapse for Elen as she walks the paths of her childhood as an adult. Elen's possession pal, Sara'ala, operates as foil to the prince via a subtle critique of societies that seek to take credit for past accomplishments that weren't theirs. It's also a good example of how fragile human memory is, and therefore, how easily history can be broken. Someone (I forget who; please sound off in the comments if it was you) talked about how they read Spore, and the Pall it comes from, as an example of a how climate change can destroy connections between communities. The destruction creates avenues for exploitation in the absence of resources. The rise of the Pall in the north cut apart the Tranquil Empire from huge pieces of itself. The way the north responded was to get mean and vindictive! Then they doubled down on child slavery so the upper classes could have enough to eat and avoid being turned into horrifying zombie creatures. A whole society of jerks!

In the Nameless Land—Gevulin calls it Farlandia, because he's clever but apparently not a writer—the government structure is cruel specifically by its use of physical violence. In the Tranquil Empire, the violence is smoothed over by a veneer of courtesy. That courtesy breaks down behind closed doors and when the powerful are challenged, of course, and is conditional on which official is wielding power at any given time. We see higher Tranquil Empire officials be forgiving and accommodating while officials in lower positions in the Flower Court are deeply protective of their power and miserable to others without it (I still don't like you, Hemerlin).

Multiple times during my read through I found myself comparing the ways the two governments operated. While I had many critiques of the Tranquil Empire during the first book, as soon as I finished the second I went, "Okay, I can see why Elen would prefer the polite fiction of orderliness." That's what so many of us are living with now with our current governments: a lie, sometimes polite with good parts, and most of the time, not. The Tranquil Empire is still high on their own supply, though. They've already started the xenophobia step in their downward spiral. And yet, the regular people must go on living in the world, despite the machinations of the powerful.

The Nameless Land is fast-paced. Things are happening, and they keep happening, and then you look up and whoops, it's dawn. It's a proper adventure novel, with betrayals and daring rescues and sudden revelations that unfurl unexpected answers to questions I never thought to ask. I speculated that I would be disappointed if we didn't learn more about Sara'ala and his past, but in truth it ended up being the perfect amount of information for this story that's very much from Elen's perspective. History, both of people and society, is so infinitely fragile. It's easily lost to time if not cared for and valued. Sometimes, even if it is cared for, disrespect of the environments we create to house it can result in us losing access, as well.

If you liked The Witch Roads, The Nameless Lands is a pitch-perfect ending to an incredibly fun duology.

About the Flower Court: I kept trying to puzzle out the order. I may have gotten the last few:

Peony
Honeysuckle
Bamboo
Orchid
Hibiscus
Ailanthis
Lily
Magnolia (the books take place here)

For the beginning of the Empire, I think the Lotus Clan was followed by Chrysanthemum, but after that I have a bunch of questions. I'm not sure where Azalea, Jasmine, and Mulberry fit, but I do think that it went Mallow, Oak, then Willow. I don't know whether they're closer to Elen's era or earlier. I'm also missing a few, because there's supposed to be 19 if we count the founders. I was told the companion novels will solve the mystery (IN 2027!??!), but I was so determined to figure it out in this book. I want to go back on a re-read and mark every mention of a court, with color coding.

I'm gonna make a murder wall of this book's world building, a totally normal thing to do about a fantasy novel.

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Let's Get Literate! Books I Wish I Could Read for the First Time

Wed, 05 Nov 2025 08:13:41 GMT

Posted by: renay

As we end the year, I'm resisting the capitalistic urge to have my favorites list out in December for Content Reasons. Those of us dedicated to the ways of book blogging know that personal lists are best out in January because there's always a chance a book picked up in the dead space between holidays and the new year hits different. I will link to best of lists in Intergalactic Mixtape (because I am weak, and I love them), but that's it. I will not create my own!

To distract myself, while I was redoing my bookshelves, I made a list of books where I thought, "Wow, I would love to be able to read that again for the first time."

Warchild by Karin Lowachee

While presentation- and description-wise Warchild sounds like a standard military space opera, the book is an emotional character study of a kid caught up in a massive war and how the trappings of war can poison interpersonal relationships. There's unavoidable trauma of trying to be your own person while people around you, many who claim you can trust them, use you for their own ends because of their own desires and political goals.

My love of this book centers on Jos, who we meet at the beginning of the book as a small child. We follow him as he grows up being groomed into someone who can help bring an end to a devastating war via spycraft. This is an older book, published in 2002. The writing is drastically different than we see from most space opera today, but it was so subtle, engaging, and gutting that I still wish I could experience it for the first time again.

The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley

Another military science fiction title that tackles war! I first read Kameron Hurley with God's War, a bug magic, fever dream of a book. As she published more, her books grew more violent, gory and...moist...in ways I'm too much of a wimp for, and so it was a random library chance that I picked up The Light Brigade. It wasn't not gory; it's a book about war. But as Dietz tries to solve the mystery of what's happening in the field, it raises a lot of questions about choices and complicity.

I also, as a rule, don't tend to like books about time travel because I have to find characters extremely interesting on top of keeping track of timelines. But something about the way Dietz's views on war and hope deepen and change as the story progresses broke something open in me when I read it, when we were rapidly approaching the 2020 election. This is a unapologetically political novel, clear-eyed and grim about the ways people are inevitably and permanently altered by waging war on each other.

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison

Back when this book came out, I was told, "Don't worry about the language/names, just trust yourself. You'll love it." Reader, I did and it was perfect. This is one of those fantasy novels that rolls up its sleeves and goes, "You want an immersive fantasy novel? I'm going to show you a damn immersive fantasy novel."

It's been a long time since I've read it so I could almost get the experience of reading it as if I had never experienced it before. Alas, I will never forget the abyssal feeling of those first few chapters, the delightful sink into the world Addison built that compounds as you go deeper into Maia's bewildering experience of being thrust into power.

I read The Goblin Emperor as an ARC, when it didn't have any pronunciation guides. I was living life on hard mode. Now there's a whole audiobook, too. I'm seriously considering doing an audio/book read along.

Driving the Deep by Suzanne Palmer

This is the second book in the Finder Chronicles. The series revolves around Fergus Ferguson, a galactic repo man who finds things for people because he's very busy avoidng past family trauma while also collecting exciting new traumas. Fergus is a competent loner with honed observation skills. He's also a massive nerd. I love him. This second book might be good without reading the first, Finder, but in these parts we're completionists. There's some important character development in the first book, so I say read both in order.

Driving the Deep was claustrophobic and tense, with little sparks of found family, cats, and a rescue/heist. The reason why I would love to read it again for the first time is a spoiler that's best enjoyed in context. Palmer introduces an element of introspection to the series in this book where the pressure—both literally and figuratively—starts to break Fergus's shell a little around caring about people openly. Palmer's character work is so good and subtle! I'm so upset I can't experience Fergus discovering he has Intense Friendship Feelings via Traumatic Kidnappings again.

The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie

The long reason The Raven Tower is on this list is a spoiler for why The Raven Tower is on this list. Luckily, I have a long-winded non-spoiler story related to it. This book is special because it's one I've done the most reccing for in my local library. I'm responsible for at least three checkouts that I know of directly, and maybe more, because I've recced it to other locals outside the library (aggressively).

One: a woman and I were browsing the new books shelf and she seemed indecisive, so I asked her what she liked. Her answer was classic literature and mysteries. She cited Hamlet explicitly, so in true Intensely Fannish Fashion I asked if she would try a fantasy novel if it was related to Hamlet and she said yes.I trotted off to the SFF section and got The Raven Tower (does anyone else say hi to books they love on library shelves?). I warned her about the second person POV, but said that if she trusted Leckie, she would, like me, probably be crying about a rock.

Two: a different woman and I reached for the same fantasy book on the library shelf at the same moment (The Bone Shard Daughter by Andrea Stewart). I let her go first, because I already knew the blurb; I just wanted to sample the text. After she read it, we had a conversation about how her son was really into fantasy and she wanted to read more so they could trade recommendations. I said, "How do you feel about Hamlet?" And she responded, "I've seen and liked the Lion King if that counts?" I knew immediately this would be fruitful! Once again I trotted off to the fantasy section, grabbed The Raven Tower, and told her to have tissues ready for the whole crying about rocks situation.

Three: The other day, I ran into a friend on my way to a Friends of the Library meeting. This friend was also one of my college professors (we do political organizing together now), and I loved his English classes. He's a mystery reader, but I saw my opening and was like, "You'll take a book rec based on Hamlet, right?" The answer was yes, and so once again! I retrieved The Raven Tower and got a rec from him in return. However, I didn't warn him about the emotional damage waiting for him re: rocks. My revenge for my first paper in his class, where he gave me a B+, is finally served.

A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark

I had a copy of this book on my shelf for years. I also needed to make a scarf as a gift for someone. Solution: get the audiobook and profit from the absolute treasure of an adventure story. I'm hit or miss with a lot of historical fantasy, but the vibes in A Master of Djinn were pristine. It reminded me of the little wooden puzzle boxes you can buy where the secret is figuring the right movements to find the secret compartment. Oh, and the puzzle box is manipulated in the hand of an extremely fashionable lady investigator.

The romance in the book doesn't take up much space, but it's the reason why I wish I could reread the book again for the first time. I didn't expect it to be quite as romantic as it was. I don't need Clark to try his hand at more longform romantic fantasy, but he could absolutely smash it if he ever got a hankering. If someone wanted a rec for a book with the same vibe as The Mummy, A Master of Djinn checks all the boxes and manages to deal with race, gender, and class in a more responsible way.

I experience audiobooks and hard copy a little differently; the former is more immersive for me and the latter more analytical. While I can't read A Master of Djinn for the first time again, I can get as close as possible by using the hard copy the next time I do a reread.

Since my massive reading slump in 2020, I've become a lot kinder to myself when it comes to re-reading. It's nice to spend time with familiar characters and worlds. I'm trying really hard to be gentle with my brain, which is overtaxed by the Horrors. An election year seems like the perfect time for a reread spree. It's very likely all of these books, and their companion/sequel novels, will be on my December TBR/2026 reading list.

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The Shattering Peace by John Scalzi

Tue, 23 Sep 2025 00:39:55 GMT

Posted by: renay

To begin, a complaint.

I can't believe they gave us The Shattering Peace with a John Harris cover but rereleased all the other books with some generic abstract art.

WAT R U DOIN’ TOR!!! Justice for the original covers! Part of this is, of course, that I want all my editions to match. The other part is that I know the generic space art covers are out of fashion in the current market, and yet! I fear I will have to suffer while I wait for the collector’s edition of all the books in the series with John Harris covers in trade or hardcover (I have given up on the return of mass market, I guess). I will start saving now in hopes Tor works something out for collectors. Okay, complaint checkpoint complete.

I had a good time with The Shattering Peace.

I remember when I first read Old Man's War by John Scalzi. It was fast-paced and quippy and fun; it was what I needed to get back into science fiction after feeling ostracized from the literary arm. As a bonus, he didn't hate queer people! (I checked before I read the first book.) Hands up if you were also burned by Orson Scott Card!

It's a beloved series. The publisher capitalized on that popularity to try new things they might not risk with another author, like the time two of the books in the series, The Human Division and The End of All Things, received individual releases of chapters as e-books and then were packaged together for hardcover release later. The first trilogy and companion novel follow John Perry and Jane Sagan; the aforementioned digital-to-hardcopy release featured a character introduced in Old Man's War, newly crowned as a Protagonist. Now The Shattering Peace fast forwards into the future to tell a story about a side character from The Last Colony and Zoe's Tale.

I reread the whole series in preparation for The Shattering Peace. Scalzi’s writing, from Old Man's War to The End of All Things, obviously improves. His ability to lay out plot does, too, although it falters a bit in The Last Colony. There was an entirely other book to write from the perspective of a secondary character to earn the ending of The Last Colony and move it from "life-saving MacGuffin suddenly appears with no cost" to a rewarding conclusion.

Also, there's this trick Scalzi uses in which the heroes will discuss how to get out of the latest Life-Threatening Situation. There will be conversations and planning, but the reader doesn't see any of that. The action will flash forward, and the reader learns about the machinations in an unfolding summary of events. It's effective in the moment, but when you're mainlining all the books the trickery of it becomes more obvious. The structure of his stories started to show and trip me out of the narrative in ways his competence with dialogue and action scenes couldn't quite make up for. This did, unfortunately, happen with The Shattering Peace, too. One could argue that it's in the spirit of the series—start as you mean to go on—but I also thought that The Shattering Peace's resolution felt too compressed and needed more room to breathe. All those offscreen actions could have had interesting world building ramifications.

("Just admit you want more books, Renay!" you cry. "You’re not wrong," I say, defensively. "I can’t believe what that ending means for Gretchen! Two things can be true at once!")

The Shattering Peace is, in theory, standalone. It drops you into the wider world and gives the reader the context from the original trilogy and Zoe's Tale. The Human Division and The End of All Things add a lot of seasoning to the world of The Shattering Peace that can be useful to parse the internal politics, but I see the argument they're not necessary. Of course, I can't unread the series to know—I'd be really interested to hear from readers who start from The Shattering Peace and work backwards.

The story follows Gretchen Trujillo, a character we meet in The Last Colony and Zoe's Tale. She’s a teenager then; the best friend of John Perry's daughter, Zoe. In Peace, Gretchen has grown up and become a diplomat that sometimes gets to beat people up for fun. She is roped into a secret government project (Yet Another Ill-Advised Colony that's in trouble) via some quality nepotism. This puts her into a direct path of conflict with the Consu, the most advanced local race. The Consu are, let's say, violently quirky. They're also really good at MacGuffins, as aforementioned. Sufficiently advanced technology, magic, etc.

In Scalzi's work, his characters sometimes meld together. He has a habit of falling back into a snappy, fast-paced dialogue. It's incredibly fun to read, but is like the literary version of the Nerds Gummy Clusters. I love both Scalzi's snappy dialogue and Nerds Gummy Clusters, but I don't recommend an entire book/bag of them. In writing this can often result in a loss to characterization for a deeper view of the characters, their relationships, and their motivations for large plot decisions. With the clusters...don't eat that much sugar at once, kids.

I was pleasantly surprised that Gretchen and her aide, an Obin named Ran, felt like newly discovered, distinct people in a series where characterization often takes a backseat to big ideas. The Consu, finally getting a major, center-stage starring antagonist role in the series, were also incredibly fun to dislike. After that, the narrative paints other new characters with a misty brush. This includes the romance. This series has a lot of these incidental partnerships—almost all heterosexual (yawn). I get why it's here, but for people new to the series it could feel unnecessary because the emotional resonance from Zoe's Tale will be missing. New readers won't know Gretchen's past and what she went through with her friends to make the reconnection pop. These things end up not mattering too much. This is Gretchen's story first, and partially Ran's, too, and how their friendship and dedication to their people save the day.

There are larger conversations about the world building in this series when it comes to colonization. These could be explored, but perhaps the place to do so isn't a review of a single volume. There’s too much to select series-wide: the racism and xenophobia of the Colonial Union to the ethics of handling dead bodies/experimentation to the why of all this colonization in the first place and then all the way down to "ostensible good guys murdering babies". The series knows and makes clear to the reader, from the beginning, that the way colonizing and government works in this universe hovers somewhere around "holy authoritarianism, bro" and only escalates from there. The way the Colonial Union handles its people and the aliens it shares the universe with is a human rights nightmare. The way the Colonial Union handles Earth: big are-we-the-baddies.gif energy. The whole series deals with an end to the way colonization and the rampant war/murdering works in this universe, and Peace continues that trend, but with...wait for it..multiverse colonization. I haven't decided how I feel about this yet, but it does open up a lot of fertile ground for exploration if Scalzi wanted to write this series until he's 82.

I enjoyed The Shattering Peace, but I want to see how it holds up on a reread. My initial takeaway is that the fans of the series will be perfectly happy with this addition, but don't get excited about the most critical reunion of all (it's Gretchen and Zoe, obvs), which The Shattering Peace stomps any chance of into dust. It's fine! I'll live! This is why fanfic exists! For not-fans of the series, anything that annoyed you about the original trilogy, or Scalzi's other work, will likely annoy you here, too. But the quality and structure of the writing and narrative are more similar to The Human Division and The End of All Things, if you liked those better. Yeah, that's right! I have given the best, totally non-frustrating answer: it depends.

I'm notoriously hard to please once a series goes deeper than five books (two exceptions: The Murderbot Diaries, which are perfect and good in every way and can do no wrong and October Daye), but I had a lot of good, commercial fun with The Shattering Peace. It will look great on my shelf with my hardcover copies of Zoe's Tale, The Human Division, and The End of All Things...and my original mass market trilogy editions that don't match (sob). Good commercial fun was clearly the main goal, especially in these Times of Horrors. If the secondary goal was: revisit this world and close some loops left hanging by the previous books but create some new story avenues for the future, it's a success! For new readers, it should be be fine, although my reservations about the romance remain.

Now I'm wondering what I would put on a romance rec list for THE John Scalzi. Please chime in with ideas.

Note: Tor Books sent a physical ARC after I asked for it! I read it and wrote this. Please don't black list me for comparing Scalzi's books to Nerds Gummy Clusters, Tor.

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Chill Chinese Reality Shows Rec List

Tue, 29 Jul 2025 15:21:26 GMT

Posted by: forestofglory

In the last few years I’ve gotten into Chinese reality shows. I like them because they are relaxing, feature teamwork, and often have fun outfits and stage design. They are also helpful for my Chinese language study.

The term for all of these shows in Mandarin is zongyijiemu (綜藝節目) which I most often see translated as “variety show”, but seems to be a term for any kind of unscripted TV. I’ve used the term reality show here because that’s what I’m more familiar with and what I think will be more familiar to Lady Business readers.

Reality shows are a bit of a sidestep from my love of Chinese dramas. I got into these in part because I wanted to see my favorite actors in other contexts, and because I wanted something that worked for me to watch in short chunks, but was low stress. I have RSI problems with my hands and it helps to take frequent short rests, and these types of shows work well for me as things to watch in my hand breaks. These shows tend to have quite long episodes (over an hour) and I would have trouble watching an episode in one go but they work for me in smaller pieces.

There are a lot of Chinese reality shows but the ones I like are chill. I have dropped several reality shows that I tried that were stressing me out! I prefer shows where either there’s no competitive element or the contestants aren’t stressed out about the competition. I also want the contestants to look like they are enjoying themselves most of the time. It’s no fun watching people be miserable.

All of these shows feature celebrities rather than otherwise unknown people, unlike most english language reality shows I’ve seen. I enjoy seeing my favorite actors and singers hanging out with each other and playing silly games.

I love it when reality shows get people to team up and work together! There’s something very satisfying about seeing people learning about each other and developing friendships. There’s sometimes a mentorship aspect as well.

The outfits in these shows can be really fun! Chinese male celebrities seem to have different sets of expectations about what they can wear than Western celebrities. There are some very strong limits on what they can wear (including censorship), but they also have a lot more freedom in terms of color and cut of their clothing. So they wear colorful outfits, featuring things like giant buttons, ruffles and sparkles. The women wear some fabulous things too. And outfits inspired by historical Chinese fashions are common, so you’ll often see touches like dramatically painted fabric, cross collars, and frog buttons. It feels very colorful and vibrant.

One of the downsides of Chinese reality shows is product placements.The contestants will generally at some point stop and talk about how great the sponsoring product is. Sometimes it's funny but mostly it's annoying.

Most of these are available on youtube with English subtitles, though a few of them have been taken down since I watched them. Where possible I have provided links to youtube playlists. The subtitles can be a bit rough, and are occasionally missing. (Shows featuring singing rarely have subtitles for the lyrics, for example.) However, they generally have hard-coded Mandarin subtitles, which are helpful for language learning.

Our Song Seasons 1 and 3
The premise of this show is that up-and-coming singers form partnerships with established singers and sing together. This was the first Chinese reality show I watched, and the first season may still be my favorite reality show season I’ve seen. Unfortunately I've only been able to find these two seasons with English subtitles, so they are the only two I’ve watched.

My favorite thing about Our Song is the teamups. The singers always seem to enjoy their partners' company and learn a lot from each other. I love that both singers in the pair are generally excited to work with each other.

Our Song also has the best stage design of all the singing reality shows I’ve watched. I have no idea how they put together such complicated and beautiful sets in a week! But they do, and it really adds the performances.

I also learned a lot about the history of pop music in Chinese languages from this show! Many of the songs sung on this show are classics of Chinese pop and so it's fun to look them up, and learn about the the original version and its context.

Marvelous City
This a six-episode show where each episode focuses on a different city through the lens of someone who grew up there. It’s cool to see fairly ordinary parts of these cities. There’s noodle restaurants, public transit, bookstores, etc. There is a second season of this show but I wasn’t able to find it with English subtitles.

The Truth Seasons 2 and 3
This is a show where the contestants play a very elaborate game that's like a cross between a murder mystery dinner party and an escape room. There are sets with multiple buildings to explore, rooms to search for clues, and puzzles that need to be solved. Sometimes they have to crawl through the ducts or rappel down buildings. There are also occasional jump scares when they are exploring dark places.

I tried watching the first season of this show but didn’t really enjoy it. It's very slow. However they changed the format a lot for the second season, and I love that one as well as the third season.

In the second season, the cases took place in five different time periods starting in 1924 and moving forward until the last cases take place in the future, with two cases in each time period for a total of 10 cases. There were five core cast members and a rotating sixth person. In each era they had different costumes appropriate to the era. The costumes were all fabulous and super fun. I also loved the group dynamics!

For the third season they brought back the five core cast members from the 2nd season, as well as the longest running guest member. The group chemistry was fabulous! Also they gave us even more costumes, with at least one set of costumes per case. I especially loved the costumes that looked like they should be part of a modern production of A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, and the historical Chinese dress inspired costumes! This season also had a tighter and better plotted overall story.

(content note: many of the offscreen backstories involve upsetting things like child death or queerphobic violence. In season 3 they discover a (fake) skeleton of a child in a suitcase.)

Keep Running: The Ancient Tea-Horse Road
Keep Running is a long-running travel variety show. So far I’ve only seen this one season, though I plan to watch more. In this special season the contestants travel along the ancient tea horse-road from Yunnan to Tibet, taking in the sights, learning about the history and also eating delicious-looking local food and playing silly games. It was very fun, and I loved all the historical info and beautiful scenery.

Melody Journey
This is a show that matches songwriters with original songs with singers. Unusually for reality shows featuring singing, all the songs are new music. The songwriters each demo their songs to a group of singers, then there’s a period of time when the singers can speak with the songwriters, and finally there is a matching process to pick who sings what song. (Not every song gets sung, and not every singer sings every week/) Then we get to see performances of all the songs that got matched! I enjoy the interactions – it's a fun mix of banter and serious craft talk. It’s also cool to get a sense of how songs are developed.

I’d love to hear about your favorite chill reality shows, Chinese or otherwise!

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Sidetracks - July 11, 2025

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 23:55:23 GMT

Posted by: 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.

Anna

1. I thought this re-creation of a garden in Pompeii was really cool!

Renay

2. Denver Zoo's Baby African Pancake Tortoise has a name!

3. There's a few hours to go in the Strange Horizons fund drive.

4. Ngozi Ukazu, author of Check, Please, has a new graphic novel, titled Flip.

5. The new federal duck stamp is available! I talked at length about last year's duck stamp entries. I sort of guessed the winner and so I'm very excited to get my 2025 duck stamp. Should I write a post about all the artists I'm following this year? Maybe I should.

6. I'm at the Pizza Hut
I'm at the Silent Hill
I'm at the combination Pizza Hut and Silent Hill

7. The Fandom Platform Diaspora (I have been in fandom so long I can think of several other platform losses, sob.)

8. All my SFF links are over in Issue #10 of Intergalactic Mixtape. Every week I think, "Oh, I guess this will be a smaller issue." and then I look at the finished product and wonder where everything came from.

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Let's Get Literate! July 2025 Hopefuls

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 05:41:42 GMT

Posted by: renay

Well, I made a reading list last month...how did I do?

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh
Raybearer by Jordan Ifueko
The Knight and the Moth by Rachel Gillig
A Song of Legends Lost by M.H. Ayinde
The Last Colony by John Scalzi

2/5...I'll take it! I wanted more library holds to work out for me, but them's the breaks when you read newer books coveted by the masses. I read Raybearer and The Last Colony from the above list, plus:

The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson
Into the Riverlands by Nghi Vo
Mammoths at the Gate by Nghi Vo
When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi
First-Time Caller by B.K. Borison
Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky

My favorite book this month was 100% The Raven Scholar at 5/5 bananas, followed closely by Mammoths at the Gate. Everything else was solid. Weirdly, I liked When the Moon Hits Your Eye better than Alien Clay for plot reasons, but Alien Clay better for character reasons. But The Raven Scholar and the Singing Hills Cycle are operating at a different level re: characters. I wrote about each SFF title in more detail over at Intergalactic Mixtape #9.

What's in store for July? Here's what I've got:

The Knight and the Moth by Rachel Gillig | Orbit | May 2025
She's back! My library holds didn't work out in my favor in June. It doesn't matter if it says "first in line" or not, I guess. :P I've seen some mixed reviews since I added this, but I refuse to give up my spot in the library check out line! S O O N.

Harmattan Season by Tochi Onyebuchi | Tor | May 2025
Fantasy noir! Roseanna gave this a rave review, with only a few quibbles, so of course I placed a hold immediately so I can try it out. We'll see how kind the library is about this one. :P

A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping by Sangu Mandanna | Berkley | July 2025
I loved The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches. I immediately wanted more of Mandanna's fantasy work and was crushed when this book didn't come out in 2024. But it's out SOON and I will be reading it ASAP.

I learned last year that she also wrote a YA science fiction series that starts with A Spark of White Fire. I keep meaning to order it, because it's old enough my library doesn't have it anymore.

The Death of Mountains by Jordan Kurella | Lethe Press | March 2025
I feel like my pal Roseanna is all over this list because her review of this novella had me immediately checking if my library had it (no) or if I could order it (yes, the ebook is available via B&N!).

I'm a sucker for a story-inside-a-story, and this is one where a mountain is the main character and the Death of Mountains has come to end them...but first, they trade stories.

Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi | Tor | August 2008
My reread continues as I prepare for The Shattering Peace. This is a retelling of The Last Colony from the perspective of the main character's daughter. Anyone who has read the other book knows the ending of this one, so there's less tension.

I tend to like this version of the story better than The Last Colony, because Zoe is so important to the plot and things happen that can't be covered in The Last Colony, but I know I'm in the minority. We'll see how it holds up!

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett | Del Rey | February 2024
I've already started this; it's part of my Hugo Award reading that I fear may be over due to burnout. I was holding a grudge against this author after he did the Bury Your Gays trope in a City of Stairs. The weird pro-AI stuff earlier this year didn't help.

My feelings are complicated because this book is doing really cool things with characterization and world building. Weird supernatural/biological stuff! Giant stompy beasts! A murder mystery! Very cool interpersonal character dynamics! I'm pained. But if any main characters who happen to be queer die horribly in this book I will swear off this author forever.

June was a pretty good reading month. It's been so nice to read without so much friction getting started. Now I can turn my recent book buying habit (I went a little wild for my birthday) into a book reading habit. Those books:

Battle of the Bookstores by Ali Brady
Ocean's Godori by Elaine U. Cho (shelf copy)
The Witch Roads by Kate Elliott (shelf copy)
Notorious Sorcerer by Davinia Evans
Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson (shelf copy)
The Two Lies of Faven Sythe by Megan E. O'Keefe
Remember You Will Die by Eden Robins
Prophet by Sin Blaché + Helen Macdonald
Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite
The Mountain Crown by Karin Lowachee (ebook)
Redsight by Meredith Mooring (ebook)
If Found, Return to Hell by Em X. Liu (ebook)
Saint Death's Daughter by C.S.E. Cooney (ebook)

I definitely don't have a problem and can quit whenever I want. :D

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Sidetracks - June 26, 2025

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 03:27:39 GMT

Posted by: 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.

Anna

1. Recently I attended Wiscon, a feminist SFF convention, which was held online this year. Because it was a busy weekend I didn’t end up going to that many events as I would have liked. One of the things I missed was the vid show. So I was happy that Betty posted some highlights You can also check out a playlist of almost all the vids.

2. This article comparing urban form in the US and China is really interesting!

Renay

3. Jenny wrote Anatomy of a Sex Scene: A Gentleman Undone, Cecilia Grant and it is great. I would read a whole series of these (hint hint).

4. For my birthday, I got an air fryer so I've been all over the internet bookmarking tasty-looking recipes, or unhinged ones (no in-between) like this corndog recipe. Google is useless now, so if anyone out there has a fave dish for the air fryer that's not spicy (my stomach cannot handle heat), hit me up.

5. It's been eight weeks and I have eight issues of Intergalactic Mixtape! It doesn't feel like there should be that many. I launched a book rec form so I can potentially do more themed rec lists in the future.

6. Given the news…this video is back in rotation and it's been wilding watching a new generation discover it. And by that I mean Boomers, because that's where I saw it going viral.........on Facebook.

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Adventures Elsewhere — May 2025

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 22:00:30 GMT

Posted by: helloladies

Adventures Elsewhere collects our reviews, guest posts, articles, and other content we've spread across the Internet recently! See what we've been up in our other projects. :D

Anna

➝ I posted a second translation from classic chinese! This one is shorter than the first one and features a lot of cool things like magic textiles and a traveling kitchen!

➝ I posted some pictures of my recent sewing projects

Renay

➝ I released an episode of Fangirl Happy Hour after a long, reality-induced hiatus. It was an episode Diana and I recorded last year about the fall 2024 books we were looking forward to, plus our recent reading (at the time).

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Our Favourite Media of May 2025

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 21:55:13 GMT

Posted by: helloladies

Each month, we look back over the media we loved in the previous month, from books to film to video games and more. This entry in the series was written a while ago, but we haven't posted a favorite media since then, so we're posting it now for maximum completion!

Anna

Our Song Season 1 (2019) — I consider myself very unmusical so I was surprised by how much I loved this Chinese singing competition! It was amazing! The show pairs established singers with newcomers, to compete as pairs. I love how excited everyone was to learn from each other, and the rapport with the teams. It’s very firmly in the genre of reality TV shows where the contestants like and support each other.

I found myself rewatching many of the performances again and again. Sometimes I would go learn a bit about the history of the song or look up the lyrics and then watch a few more times. I watched semi-synchronously with a friend and between the two of us we learned so much about the history of popular music in China.

Susan

Sinners (2025) — I had no idea what to expect from Sinners beyond "The Devil Went Down to Georgia, but with vampires and the mob," and honestly I don't know if I could have expected it. The music! The contrast between the Smokestack Twins trying to build a community and bring others with them, versus the vampire forcing people into his "family!" The protagonists keeping and creating their own identities, versus the vampire as representation of forced cultural assimilation! The fight scenes! The visuals! The music! God, there was so much going on and I am still turning it over in my brain, but it was excellent.

Frieren S1-2 — This might be the first show I've watched with a long-lived character where time actually feels like it has weight. Frieren's scale of experience is so different to that of every other character, and watching her trying to fumble her way towards bridging that gap is delightful. And I loved that the show itself is focused on the small moments of living! Like, there are fights and Heroic Quests and things, but they're not the point – the point is what those fights and those quests reveal about Frieren and the people around her. It's such a quiet show, and I really enjoyed it.

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The Witch Roads by Kate Elliott

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 02:46:29 GMT

Posted by: renay

I devoured The Witch Roads in three days.

Storygraph tells me it was four, but that's because I started it at 10PM. I don't recommend starting books you're looking forward to that late. It's a rookie mistake.

Kate Elliott's been writing long enough that if you've read her books before you'll know if you like her style and world building habits. Otherwise, The Witch Roads is a very accessible place to hop into her adult epic fantasy for those brand new to her work. I read a little about the novel via Elliott's Patreon, so I didn't know what to expect from this story. What I found was an experience that reminded me of the first time I read Cold Magic, my first and best beloved Elliott novel.

I'm behind on Elliott's recent books. She's released two volumes of a space opera and two novellas, Servant Mage and The Keeper's Six. I've only read the latter. I liked it a lot, but wish it were more widely read so there could be more portal adventures. Other than The Keeper's Six, my most recent books by her were her YA trilogy Court of Fives and Black Wolves (never forgiving publishing for having a great epic fantasy author in their wheelhouse and then refusing to market her book!!! STRAIGHT TO JAIL!!!). It feels like the writing in recent, shorter work is tensed, like a muscle that can't relax. I noticed it in Court of Fives, which was obviously constrained due to the different publishing category and nature of the work. I felt it again in The Keeper's Six, which was acquired and published as a novella. It makes sense there, too. Elliott is an epic fantasy/science fiction author, so the places where form and style clash will show where she's not allowed to sprawl and build out the worlds she's imagining. I can't speak to the space opera, because I haven't read it yet, so I could be totally off! But! The Witch Roads feels like Elliott set free.

Elen is a courier, walking an assigned route to carry messages and check for deadly Spore and cut it out before it can infect people and cause a horrific, deadly outbreak. Elen's effectiveness at ridding her community of Spore is a secret from everyone. This includes her young nephew, who is about to enter the world as an adult, but is uncertain of his path. But both their lives are upturned with the arrival of a conceited royal that Elen is assigned to lead further into the kingdom for a quest only he understands. Elen, desperate to get away from her home after her past suddenly catches up with her and her nephew, is happy to have the excuse to get on the road. However, at the very first signs of danger, the prince ignores her warnings (typical) and gets himself—and Elen, who is the only one to know the truth the "Prince" is now hiding—into a bundle of "possessed by a mysterious ancient being" trouble.

A world that feels like it has deep roots and we're only seeing a part of it? Yes! Royal hijnks that normal folk get caught up in through no fault of their own? Yep. Exploration of power imbalances? This is Kate Elliott. A subtle romance plot? Yep. A flip where instead of following the young adventurer, we instead get the adventure from the mentor's perspective? Oh yeah. There's body possession and secret plots and spoiled royals and extremely subtle flirtation that's both entertaining and heartbreaking.

The Witch Roads explores class divides, who wields power and how, and all the ways people in lower classes take back a little power whenever they can. And as always, the narrative centers women. Elen is a hardened person due to her past circumstances, and that hardness complicates her ability to make connections. Part of this story is her coming to terms with her lack of openness and willingness to trust people she cares about with her weaknesses. Elliott's work is often about how women move through the world and shift circumstances with their agency. Said world (read: cis men, and also: cis women in proximity to power who want to retain that power) tells them repeatedly they don't have, can't have agency, because of their birth and class and ability, and their response? "Challenge accepted."

The Witch Roads is another book with evil mushrooms. Mushrooms sure are having a moment.

The book is out now! The Nameless Lands, the sequel and final book, will be out in November.

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Let's Get Literate! June 2025 Hopefuls

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 07:30:44 GMT

Posted by: renay

We're counting down until mid-year!

Myy May TBR turned out to be more of a suggestion.

The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo
Loud: Accept Nothing Less Than the Life you Deserve by Drew Afualo
What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher
Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark
Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky

I read What Moves the Dead because I managed to read What Feasts at Night. And although I didn't get to The Brides of High Hill, I did reread The Empress of Salt and Fortune and grab When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain on my way to it. :D

June's a new month! And I've already read one of my anticipated books for the month, The Witch Roads by Kate Elliott. Plus I blazed through The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson because my library hold came in and I was afraid it would run out before I could finish. I want everyone to read these books! They're very different, but so thoughtful about power. The Witch Roads feels like a road trip with your adventurous aunt in a historical but deadly countryside while trying to solve a mystery of why The Girls Are Fighting. The Raven Scholar is like if The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie and a bunch of bananas had a baby and that baby was really into jumping out of dark corridors at you screaming, "SURPRISE!" Sometimes with a knife?

With one 648 page book in the bag, here are the rest of the books I would love to get to this month:

The Incandescent by Emily Tesh | Tor Books | May 2025
The hype has gotten me. Also, because of said hype, I'm pretty sure this is an awards contender. I haven't read Some Desperate Glory yet, because it sounded fairly dark. The buzz around this one says it's quite different.

Raybearer by Jordan Ifueko | Amulet Books | August 2020
Di read this series and liked it. When another book in the series was nominated for a Lodestar Award I figured now was as good a time as any! We discussed the book on Fangirl Happy Hour last year but luckily all the knowledge and potential spoilers have leaked from my brain so I'll be able to give this a mostly fair shake. Will I also get to the sequel this month so I can read The Maid and the Crocodile? HMM.

The Knight and the Moth by Rachel Gillig | Orbit Books | May 2025
This is another peer pressure read because I keep seeing hints about a trope I love and have decided to finally check it out for myself. I've never read Gillig before. Besides the trope hints I know very little about this book. I'm keeping it that way! With new authors, if I learn too much before starting the book I get too hyped and either a) psych myself out of reading it because I'm afraid of being let down b) get too judgmental.

A Song of Legends Lost by M.H. Ayinde | S&S/Saga Press | June 2025
The inclusion of this book on the list is absolutely aspirational because it's very chunky and I still have so much Hugo reading to do plus several massive library books. The premise of this sounds pretty good! It's giving, "oh, only the monarchy can do this? LIKELY STORY!" I do love that trope! Also, that cover by Richard Anderson! What a win for the author on their debut.

The Last Colony by John Scalzi | Tor Books | April 2007
I'm rereading this series to prepare for the release of The Shattering Peace this fall. Dear Tor: call me. I enjoy this series for its fast pace and interesting ideas. Do I like colonization? No. Am I obsessed with stories about it? Yes. I'm very curious about how the political tilt of the series, written so long ago, is going to hold up. Scalzi's usually very deliberate in his space opera politics so I'm hopeful! However, these books have terrible, generic covers now. Bring back the John Harris art covers!

I think, as per usual, I psyched myself out. Can you trigger your own RSD by making lists? Am I truly a mood reader? Anyway, June's list only has five books, giving me more space to read other things based on my moods and what holds come in at the library. Library holds are unpredictable and dangerous. I have so many waiting to spring.

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Domestic Labor and Community Building Rec List

Thu, 29 May 2025 18:01:35 GMT

Posted by: forestofglory

Last year I wrote an essay about cozy SFF. I started out writing a passionate defense of cozy SFF, then I wasn't quite happy with it and put it on the shelf for a while. When I got back to it, I realized there were some things about the current moment of cozy SFF that I don't really like. So I had to edit my piece. But even then I felt the conversation was getting away from me.

I've only become more frustrated with what's being marketed as cozy SFF and the discourse around it. I find the stuff being published isn't digging into the themes that I want to see. Meanwhile the discourse is both dismissive and full of moral panic. I think both that domestic labor and community building are important and worth telling stories about and shouldn’t be dismissed, and that it's ok to read soft comforting stories. I wish people would calm down a bit.

In my essay I defined cozy SFF this way: “Cozy SFF generally has small stakes, focusing on small moments, not the fate of the world. These lower stakes generally go along with much less on-screen violence in these stories. Another key aspect of cozy SFF is that it focuses on community-building. And finally, cozy SFF honors the importance of domestic labor and other undervalued jobs”. In retrospect I don’t think this definition was very helpful because it was more about what I want cozy SFF to be than about what cozy SFF actually is. And because I ignored the issue of feelings, but how cozy SFF makes people feel is important to the conversation even if people can have wildly different emotional reactions to the same work. I find the the subjectivity of emotional reactions leads to very frustrating conversations, and I wanted to ignore that, but it’s important to how people talk about cozy SFF whether I like it or not.

However my definition does make a good framework for a rec list. So here are some works that fit at least in part with the above definition, though most of them are not being discussed as cozy SFF. Many of these are short fiction, where there’s a lot of lovely work about these themes, but short works are generally not part of the discourse around cozy SFF. Others of these don’t get marketed as cozy because they have the wrong vibes, or big stakes, but still have themes of domestic labor and community building.

This is not intended as a complete survey of the field, just a few things that I like that include these themes. Also my ability to engage with new fiction has been sporadic since 2020 so there aren’t as many recent works as I’d like.

”The Witches of Athens” by Lara Elena Donnelly
This is a long-time comfort read of mine, a story with coffee shops, queer romance, and sisterhood. The stakes in this are very personal and there's a focus on maintaining and building relationships. Also I love that the central relationship here is the sisterhood between the witches!

“Fandom For Robots” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad
This story about a robot making friends through transformative fandom is a great example of a story about building communities! It’s super charming. Online communities have been very important to me so I especially enjoyed that aspect.

A Half Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys
This book perfectly fits the second two parts of my definition of cozy SFF, there is so much domestic labor and community building in here! But the stakes are huge, literally the fate of the planet Earth! This book really highlights why domestic labor and community building matter. Even when the world is at stake people have to eat, and eating together can help bring about solutions to very large problems.

Chalice by Robin McKinley
This is another book with bigger stakes but also a lot of domestic labor and community building. Mirasol, the main character, is a beekeeper who unexpectedly became the Chalice, a job with both practical and metaphysical components. I love all the descriptions of beekeeping and Marasol’s cottage!

“Panhumanism Hope and Pragmatics” by Jess Barber and Sara Saab
In the comments of my original post, people talked about wanting to read stories that are personal in scope and have positive outcomes even though they are set in worlds where things are terrible. This is a story along those lines. In a post-climate disaster two people meet as teens. This is the story of their relationship over time as they both try in their own ways to make the world a little bit better.

When The Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb
This book is everything that I talked about in my definition of cozy, but I would still hesitate to call it cozy because tonally it's a bit darker, and there's some onscreen violence. But it's great! It's about an angel and a demon who leave their shtetl to help a young woman who has gone missing in the US. I love how Jewish this book is, and how it includes both Jewish religious traditions (The Angel and Demon are study buddies and argue about Torah all the time) and Jewish labor organizing (planning a strike is an important part of the story). It’s also a story about people gradually building connections to a wider community.

Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night by Iona Datt Sharma and Katherine Fabian
This is a contemporary fantasy novella about two people who have to go on a quest to save their mutual boyfriend. Along the way they met many members of the boyfriend’s community who they wouldn't have interacted with otherwise. It’s also full of domestic details, getting the kids places on time, serving dinner, silly mugs. None of these details are lingered on but they all build a picture of the characters. I love that this book makes me and so many other people feel seen for aspects of ourselves we rarely see reflected in fiction!

Please tell me about your favorite SFF that engages with themes of domestic labor and/or community building!

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