Locus awards were announced last Saturday. Best Science Fiction Novel: The Man Who Saw Seconds, by Alesander Boldizar; Best Fantasy Novel: A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher; Best Horror Novel: Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle.
Surfing around, I found this piece of short fiction from Garth Nix from last month on Reactor.
They also feature an excerpt from The Enchanted Greenhouse by Sarah Beth Durst.
Canada’s Sunburst Award longlist is out. I was disappointed by the absence of Preemee Mohamad in the novel category.
CYBILS (Children’s and Young Adults Literary) Awards are taking a hiatus in 2025, instead choosing to take steps to promote books, stories and reading. Read their statement here; it’s blunt.
The U.K. Guardian shares breathtaking photos from the Vera C. Rubin observatory. (Thanks to File 770.)
Helen Marshall discusses six books with Nerds of a Feather. I stopped at this one because she was currently reading Cahokia Jazz, which I loved.
And so here’s an article about Cahokia. These folks drank a coffee-analog and played competitive sports. How we’ve grown!
In space news—or, not really—the Space X Starship 36 blew up or experienced a “sudden major anomaly” on the launch pad last week. Guess my vacation to Mars will be delayed.
Now that summer’s here, sites are offering warm-weather, fruit-forward cocktails. Here’s a list from Oprah Daily. (Some of these look yummy.)
If the state of the arts puzzles you, and you wonder why so many novels are “retellings” and formulaic rework, and why we are seeing so many sequels to juvenile entertainment franchises that should have died an obscure death decades ago, Charles Hugh Smith has the answer for you—our culture, indeed our whole society, is Hollowed Out: https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2025/06/hollowed-out.html
A few paragraphs from the beginning of his essay give a sense of what he means by this:
”
The phrase that best describes the present era is hollowed out. By hollowed out I mean the exterior facade still looks pretty much the same as it did in the past, but the internal structure has corroded / eroded to the point that little remains of what provided strength and stability. What’s left is the illusion of stability.
Our spectacles have been hollowed out, lifeless, rote repeats of past performances, reduced to unintentional parodies of what was once vibrant.
Our entertainment has been hollowed out, dominated by remakes, retreads, threadbare extensions of tent-pole franchises and sound-alike songs.
Even our outrage has been hollowed out, perfunctory displays phoned in from afar, as we all know outrage has been exhausted along with everything else…
”
You can read the whole essay at his website (URL above) which is mainly concerned with the economy.