Norms change. That’s a foundation of stfnal thinking: all laws are local and no law knows how local it is. It’s not unusual for the bedrock ethos of your childhood to be overturned by your dotage.
As Douglas Adams put it:
Crises precipitate change. Before Russia’s despicable invasion of Ukraine, Europe’s transition to zero carbon energy lagged a decade behind schedule. Three years later, Europe has surged well over a decade ahead of schedule in their solar transition, and the process is only accelerating. It turns out that all the intractable obstacles to rapid, total technological transition just melt away when you’re shivering in the dark thanks to the aggression of …Read More
Who are we to blame for enshittification? That is, who is at fault for the pandemic of platform decay, in which the platforms we depend on, where we congregate, trade, perform, sell, buy, connect, love, argue, and mobilize are all turning into piles of shit, all at once?
50 years of neoliberal canon says that we have to blame consumers. You, me, and everyone we know cast ballots in an …Read More
Science fiction’s superpower isn’t thinking up new technologies – it’s thinking up new social arrangements for technology. What the gadget does is nowhere near as important as who the gadget does it for and who it does it to. Your car can use a cutting-edge computer vision system to alert you when you’re drifting out of your lane – or it can use that same system to narc you out …Read More
The 2025 SFWA Nebula Conference was held June 5-8 at the Kansas City Marriott Country Club Plaza in Kansas City MO and also held online for remote attendees.The conference organizers declined to state the number of attendees, but noted that there were roughly equal online and in person attendance…. 2024 had about 225 warm bodies and another 272 registered for online-only access, while 2023 had roughly 200 warm bodies …Read More
If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s nontechnical technothrillers. You know the trope: We’ve got eight minutes to crack this mainframe, but it’s protected with encryption that is rated for ten minutes. We’re gonna have to hack really hard. Come on, hacker, HACK AWAY!
Technothrillers are consumed by an increasingly computer-savvy audience, which means that the kind of technical elision and corner-cutting that dominates the field grows thinner …Read More
Science fiction, at its best, has always been about inclusiveness and acceptance of the other, a lens through which we can better understand the broadest and deepest reaches of our human condition. With the stated purpose of building relationships with an international gathering of writers from a broad range of interests and backgrounds, Hal-Con Japan continues to celebrate this view. This year’s Hal-Con took place at Kawasaki International Center …Read More
Norwescon 47 was held April 17–20, 2025 at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Seattle Airport in SeaTac WA; the theme was ”Through the Cosmic Telescope.” Guests of honor were Catherynne M. Valente (writer), Wayne Barlowe (artist), Tracy Drain (science), and Isis Asare (special guest of honor). Paizo was the spotlight publisher, represented by Jenny Jarzabski and Mike Kimmel. The weekend included hundreds of hours of programming with dozens of …Read More
The 46th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA) took place March 19-22, 2025 at the Marriott Orlando Airport Hotel Lakeside, with the theme of ”Night Terrors.”Academics, writers, publishers, editors, artists, students, independent scholars, and more participated in a weekend of conversation, papers, and events on the topic,with 363 guests attending (up from about 330 last year) and 160 people at the awards banquet. Silvia Moreno-Garcia was …Read More
If a group of people have been trying to get something done for some time without success, there are two possibilities: Either they’re failing because of bad tactics, or they’re failing because they simply lack the power to achieve their goals. When things start changing in big, dramatic ways, that means that some group in society has either discovered a new tactic, or they’ve found some new coalition partners.
Most …Read More
In my new novel Picks and Shovels, we learn the origins of Martin Hench, my bestselling, two-fisted, scambusting forensic accountant who debuted in 2023’s Red Team Blues and whose adventures continued in 2024’s The Bezzle.
Marty’s origin story starts at MIT in 1982, where he joins the proud lineage of computer science students who flunk out of their degrees because they’re too busy hacking code to do their classwork. Marty …Read More
During a recent trip to Singapore, I went book shopping. The science fiction and fantasy shelves of the Books Kinokuniya on Orchard Road predominantly featured familiar titles, but there were also a good number of locally published books by writers unknown to me. The specific publisher that caught my eye was Penguin Random House SEA, perhaps because in the UK almost all the SF titles with a penguin on the …Read More
It’s been a year, hasn’t it? Has it? Honestly, it feels like 2024 just began, and here we are at the end, staring down the uncertainty of the year to come. However, as always, my fiction reading – both for my review columns and for myself – has been a comfort and a highlight. I know I’ve missed out on many wonderful works. There are sadly only so many hours …Read More
Some years, it feels like there’s a central book in SF and fantasy, one around which the conversation orbits. A few obvious examples: Neuromancer in 1984, Ancillary Justice in 2013, This Is How You Lose the Time War in 2019. In my reading, 2024 was not such a year. There were plenty of good books – see below – but as a year it felt curiously decentered, as if the …Read More
In the summer of 2024, Briardene Books published Track Changes, a collection of my reviews. There’s nothing like putting a book like that together, combing your way through nearly 20 years of work, to make you think about the project of canon-building. What books still deserve to be talked about decades after you read them? What books represent shifts in the field, or in literature itself, that you were maybe …Read More
Once again, whatever else it was, it was a good year for books. Between new releases, revisiting older selections with a book club or two, and a very rewarding set of reads for several projects I’ve been hammering at – the Ancillary Review‘s podcast, particularly – I was practically drowning in fascinating titles. For my year-end list, I decided to narrow it down (painfully, regretfully) to my top three choices …Read More
I’d be lying if I said I was in a particularly great mental space to look back at the previous year with anything like insight or objectivity. Not only for the most obvious reasons, but because the year took it out of me in ways personal and rather profound. Of course, that seems to be largely par for the course for the last decade, which fittingly coincides with the years …Read More
Look Back, Look Forward, Look Around
I have a list, every year, of books I wanted to read but for which I ran out of time. This year’s is even longer than usual (and it includes Nalo Hopkinson’s Blackheart Man, Jedediah Berry’s The Naming Song, Sascha Stronach’s The Sunforge, August Clarke’s Metal From Heaven, and Justinian Huang’s The Emperor and the Endless Palace, to name but a few). But for …Read More
Trawling and Tunneling Through the Genres
I did not cast my net very wide this year – nine 2024 titles, with a couple of late 2023s and one early 2025 item included in the calendar year’s columns – and while the catch was small, everything I caught was a keeper, evidence of the variety that the fields of science fiction and fantasy continue to generate. I also noticed (again) how …Read More
What happened, 2024? Where did we all go wrong?
Even if it was a weird, rocky, stressful year in many ways, it was still another great year for fiction! After closing Fantasy Magazine in late 2023 I became a literary agent at kt literary, which meant that a lot of my reading time went to novel submissions. I retained my post as a reviewer for Lightspeed, among various other roles …Read More
I’m going to focus here on the best books I read this year by women and nonbinary folks, and also separate them into a few categories; I need some way to organise my thoughts.
Novellas
Three amazing novellas stand out for 2024. Ann LeBlanc’s debut novella, The Transitive Properties of Cheese is superficially a cheese heist in space; it also has a lot to say about bodies and identity …Read More
Ten for 2024 by Tim Pratt
Well, here we are, right down at the closing of the year (though you’ll read this near the beginning of the next one). 2024 was something of an annus horribilis, but as usual, I found comfort and refuge in fiction, and sometimes even inspiration to keep fighting for a chance at better tomorrows.
Still, since I’m in a dark turn of mind, I’ll start …Read More
As we are given carte blanche to write about books however we wish in these annual essays, I am going to indulge myself and share some thoughts on the titles I read in the past year that particularly impressed and/or made me happy. There were several surprises, including Annie LeBlanc Is Not Dead Yet by Molly Morris. This coming-of-age drama veers from the expected as soon as the reader realizes …Read More
After the slam dunk that was 2023, I had high hopes for 2024 – too high, as it turns out. 2023 was a rare vintage, the 1999 of films in book form (okay, maybe not that good). To expect that 2024 would scale those same heady heights was asking too much of the year, especially one already burdened by a world-shaping American election. Not that genre fiction schedules are influenced …Read More
2024 was bit of an irregular year for me, reading-wise. As per my notebooks, I read around 90 books (alas, less than my last year’s score of 110 on Goodreads) – the main course obviously being speculative fiction, with a small dessert sampling of literary fiction, romances, comics and non-fiction. The meal wasn’t entirely satisfying, as there were plenty of anticipated titles that I didn’t get to read, and plenty …Read More
2024: Descent (or Ascent) into Multiplicity
It’s a bit bracing to be reminded that I’ve been writing these yearly review columns for more than three decades, but it does put things in perspective. Some of the books mentioned in those first couple of columns, of course, are barely remembered now, but others still seem to be a significant part of the discussion – Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book, Neal Stephenson’s Snow …Read More
In my previous article on Japanese science fiction, published inLocusin 2016, I likened my experience of living in Japan to Urashima Taro’s rise from his present world (eighth century) to the world of the future, with its fast-forward jumble of pop-culture iconography. This sense of Japan and its current state in science fiction is even more relevant in the wake of COVID, as these changes have only accelerated. It’s …Read More
The 23rd Indian Association for Science Fiction Studies conference was held July 21, 2024. The highlights included a special guest lecture by renowned Romanian SF author George Dimitriu and scholarly presentations of papers on the theme ”Spotlight on the Works of Professor Jayant V. Narlikar.”
The conference began in the Indian traditional way, with the lighting of the lamp by the founding members of the association.
The event coincided …Read More
Let’s start with two obvious facts:
That means that every single policy question related to the internet will have:
With that out of the way….
Late last August, Pavel Durov – the billionaire owner of the Telegram app – was arrested by French authorities after …Read More
It takes true dreamers to make dreams happen. In the case of the Future Fiction Workshop held near Chongqing, China in June 2024, those were the intrepid Italian editor Francesco Verso and Fan Zhang, dean of the newly established Fishing Fortress Science Fiction College. Francesco, who has made World SF his life’s mission, has long worked in promoting science fiction into and out of China. Fan, who now supervises …Read More
The genre is experiencing a blooming period. Big names like George R.R. Martin, Patrick Rothfuss, Brandon Sanderson, Andrzej Sapkowski, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Robert Jordan sell hundreds of copies every week, thanks to television adaptations, but also, in recent years, fantastic fiction has been gaining ground over the other genres and is becoming, little by little, the main trend. For example, the most recent worldwide publishing phenomenon – although in …Read More
There are many ways to cleave the views of the political right from the political left, but none is so science fictional as the right’s confidence in the role of individual self-discipline on one’s life chances. Dip into any political fight about crime and poverty and you’re sure to turn up someone confidently asserting that these social ills are rooted in impatience. Poverty, we’re told, is rooted in an unwillingness …Read More
