Fiyah’s Ignyte awards were announced on Saturday. P.Djeli Clark took home Best Adult Novel for Master of Djinn; Best Young Adult Novel went to Darcie Littlebadger for A Snake Falls to Earth; Best Novella was awarded to Shingai Ngeri Kagunda for This is How to Stay Alive. View all the award winners here.

(You can hear Shingai Ngeri Kagunda read another story here.)

Charlie Jane Anders is now reviewing for the Washington ... Read More

In honor of my birthday, one commenter will get a copy of T. Kingfisher's southern gothic horror novel, The Twisted Ones.  In this column I discuss my reaction to a re-read of a classic 1990s fantasy novel.

Published in 1998, Someplace to be Flying is not the first entry in Charles de Lint’s NEWFORD series. It’s the fifth book in publishing order, with several earlier works being story collections. In my opinion, it’s a fine place to start the series and get introduced to de Lint’s fictional midwestern Canadian city (probably modeled on Ottawa) and his blend of folk magic, folk music and just folks. The mag... Read More

The Hugo winners were announced on September 4. Arkady Martine took home Best Novel for A Desolation Called Peace, Becky Chambers gathered up the Best Novella award for A Psalm for the Wild-Built, and Sarah Pinsker won Best Short Story for “Where Oaken Hearts do Gather. Best Series went to Seanan McGuire for THE WAYWARD CHILDREN, and Read More

File 770 posted its Filers locations and meet-ups during ChiCon8, which is this year’s WorldCon.

Casey Fiesler posted a thoughtful article about the internet and privacy. No innovations or new revelations here, just a considered look at fanfiction, emotional support and unintended consequences.

Vanity publishers are still around and still predatory, as this column in LitHub attests.

Thanks to File 770 for this article about Robby, the Security ... Read More

The image is from Elle Magazine’s Spring Summer 22 fashion roundup.

NASA has created a sonification of the sound emanating from a black hole.

The annual Bulwer-Lytton contest, to celebrate intentionally bad prose, announced its winners this week. Speculative fiction is well represented in the contest, as always… and so is everything else.

S.L. Huang’s article in Tor.com, tracing the history and legacy of the c... Read More

Salman Rushdie was taken off a ventilator on Sunday, and was able to speak. A lone attacker stabbed Rushdie at an event in New York state on Friday. Hadi Matar, the alleged attacker, has pled not guilt to charges of attempted murder. Rushdie is probably best known for The Satanic Verses and Midnight’s Children. Voices worldwide have joined to acknowledge his work and hope for a good recovery.

Over the weekend the Canadian Aurora awards were announced. Fonda Lee won for Best Novel for Jade Legac... Read More

[Reposted from Deedsandwords.com with permission.]

I paid #3.99 to watch Morbius. The price was about right. I don’t know the character from the comic books, but I’d seen a few articles and reviews so I knew that a doctor turned into a super-vampire.

Michael Morbius has a rare genetic condition that leaves him weak and likely to die young. He vows to find a cure. In the Greek hospital/hospice where he lives (he’s about 12) he befriends a younger boy with the same disease. the kid’s name is Lucien, but Morbius dubs him “Milo.” “You’re just the next Milo,” he says. When Morbius first arrived, the boy in the bed next to him was named Milo, and he died, as did the next and the next.

Flash forward. Michael Morbius (Jared Leto) declines the Nobel Prize for his life-sav... Read More

You can find Season One of Moonhaven on AMC+. The science fiction show’s first season finale airs on August 4, and it has already had a second season greenlighted. Having watched the first five episodes, I’m slightly more baffled than intrigued, but still watching. The most recent episode, Episode 5, explained a few things, even if it meant a lot of awkward dialogue to shoehorn in the needed info. I’m in the unusual position of watching something whose strengths and weaknesses nearly perfectly cancel one another out.

For you visual folks, Moonhaven is beautiful. The showrunners and studio invested deeply in the special effects, especially the stunning credits. In general, the interiors and exteriors of Moonhaven, a 500-square-mile patch of terraformed moon, are beautiful. The exteriors are all forests, hedges, manicured green grass, rivers, ponds and even a sea (why yes, it is the Sea of Tranquility!). Colorful weavings, intricate carving... Read More

Next week, August 3, will be a single-topic column.

Jordan Peele’s adult horror movie Nope opened to $44 million at the box office.

Marvel revealed the first Wakanda Forever trailer at San Diego Comic-Con.

Jenny Hamilton reviews Half a Soul by Olivia Atwater at Tor.com.

The site also shares upcoming August releases.

File770 Read More

Even if you’re not a Jane Austen fan, you might enjoy this acerbic (and perceptive) review of the new Netflix adaptation of Persuasion. On the other hand, The Mary Sue speaks for the defense.

No, you haven’t seen enough images from the James Webb Space Telescope yet, so here are some more.

R.L. Stein is considered the founding father of kids’ horror, and Read More

President Biden introduced the first image from the James Webb Space telescope, the deepest we’ve seen into the universe.

The Imadjinn Award winners were announced last weekend. (Thanks to File 770.)

The Last Dangerous Visions anthology has a release date of September 2024.

Alex Horman, one judge of this year’s Self Published Science Fiction Competition Read More

It’s officially been summer for two weeks now. What do you want to read for summer? Molly Templeton shares her thoughts on summer reading for grown-ups at Tor.com.

In this Ask the Smithsonian column, a reader asks about a science fiction writer the magazine admires, and they recommend Octavia Butler. (You can also learn why only men’s bikes have the crossbars.)

I don’t think I’ve done a book design link in a while. This Book Riot article has taught me to look underneath the book jacket, something I’ve never done. I’m disappointed t... Read More

2022’s Locus Awards winners include A Desolation Called Peace (Arkady Martine) for Best Science Fiction Novel, My Heart is a Chainsaw (Stephen Graham Jones) for Best Horror Novel; Jade Legacy (Fonda Lee) for best fantasy novel; Victories Greater Than Death Read More

Nerds of a Feather review K.J. Parker’s How to Rule An Empire and Get Away With It.

Over at Tor.com, they introduce us to the possibility of Count Dracula Daily, as a Substack blogger is emailing out Dracula in serial format every day.

Fantasy writer Faith Hunter has publicly apologized for harassing behavior, and withdrawn from conventions for the rest of the year, after several incidents at JordanCon this year. File 770 has two long articles on this for those who want the details.

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A Google engineer in an AI project states that they have created a sentient AI. The engineer is currently on administrative leave from Google. The article uses the word sentient, which basically means having emotions, or consciousness, but the text from the article makes it sounds like we’re discussing sapience, which is self-awareness.

Charlie Jane Anders writes about the balance to grimdark, which she has dubbed sweetweird.

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Samit Basu discusses the journey he took to imagine his newest book, The City Inside.

Tor.com spotlights new June releases.

Mary Robinette Kowal highlights the upcoming anthology The Reinvented Heart.

A Witcher school in Poland—yes, that’s what I said, a Witcher school—had to close its... Read More

As we noted in an earlier column, fantasy author Patricia McKillip passed away on May 6, 2022. This column is not an obituary; it contains some of my thoughts about her work, mostly THE RIDDLE-MASTER TRILOGY.

Many people mentioned that McKillip was their gateway to fantasy, sometimes the first fantasy book they read (in some cases, even before THE LORD OF THE RINGS). The Riddle-Master of Hed was not the first fantasy book I’d read, but it created an alchemical reaction in me—it inspired me.

The Riddle-Master of Hed was published in 1976. That November, Jimmy Carter defeated an appointee president, Gerald Ford. Read More

SFWA announced the Nebula winners on Saturday, May 21, at the Nebula Conference. P.Djeli Clark won Best Novel for  A Master of Djinn; Premee Mohamad won Best Novella for And What Can We Offer You Tonight; Sarah Pinsker won Best Short Story for “Where Oaken Hearts do Gather.” See all the winners here.

Mercedes Lackey was inducted as SFWA’s most recent grandmaster at the same event. Later, Read More

Writer David B. Coe blogs about clueless writing advice. There’s not any actual writing advice but it’s an entertaining column, and I’m pretty sure we’ve all had some version of this experience.

You can be famous a number of ways. YA SFF writer Kass Morgan, (aka Mallory Kass) author of The 100, competed on Jeopardy last week.

From last week, fantasy writer Patricia A. McKillip Read More

The podcast Tales From the Trunk hosted me last week on a Book Tour segment. I had a lot of fun; Hilary, the host of Tales from the Trunk, is a witty and welcoming host.

File 770 rounds up Hugo nominees and other anime in this article.

SWFA’s silent auction, fundraising in partnership with Worldbuilders, continues through next week.

John Palisano discusses Jewish heritage in horror.

Nerds of a Feather takes a look at the Read More

Marshal Zeringue has several blogs, and one of them is the “Page 69 Test.” The premise is this; would a reader, opening a book at random and reading page 69, have an understanding of what the book’s about? Interesting test! Here’s a recent column.

File 770 offers an excerpt from Tear Down the Throne by Jennifer Estep.

J.D. Evans’s Reign and Ruin is the winner of the Seventh Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off , in what I’d describe as a photo finish (just one-tenth of a point ahead of the runner-up).

ChiCon 8 has updated Read More

Nisi Shawl

The British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) awards were announced last weekend. Best YA novel went to The Iron Widow, by Xiran Jay Zhou; Best novel, Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky, best shorter fiction Fireheart Tiger by Aliette de Bodard. Congratulations to all the winners. 

File 770 has an article about Ukrainian art of resistance. (This column will have a couple of Ukrainian topics included.)... Read More

I don’t think I posted the Hugo Award finalists for this year. Here they are. This list shows me how behind I got in my reading last year.

The Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association announced the finalists for the Aurora Awards.

Spock’s first name has been revealed! Oh, wait, no it hasn’t. (Thanks to File 770.)

To no one’s surprise, there’s been a spike in book-banning. There’s been a spike in voter s... Read More

Silver Shamrock, an indie publisher specializing in “hard-hitting horror,” courted some controversy on the internet with its “edgy” marketing copy for an upcoming novel. When social media reacted predictably, Silver Shamrock shut down its website, released the rights to all upcoming works to its authors, and shuttered. And all that took three days. It’s item 4.

This 21-minute-long video post-mortem of Shamrock’s demise is entertaining.

Joe Abercrombie sold a new trilogy, Read More